Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel 9780226024509

Citation preview

Enlightenment Orientalism

Enlightenment Orientalism

Resisting the Rise of the Novel

srinivas aravamudan

the university of chicago press chicago and london

Srinivas Aravamudan is professor of English, the Literature Program, and Romance studies at Duke University. He is the author of two previous books, most recently of Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (2006), and the editor of two books, most recently of William Earle’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack (2005). His fi rst book, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, received the Modern Language Association’s prize for Outstanding First Book. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-02448-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-02449-3 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-02448-2 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-02449-0 (paper) Library of Congress-Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aravamudan Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism : resisting the rise of the novel / Srinivas Aravamudan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-02448-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-02449-3 (paperback : alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-226-02448-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-226-02449-0 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Orientalism—Europe— History—18th century. 2. Orientalism in literature. 3. Orient—In literature. 4. European fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 5. Enlightenment— Europe. I. Title. pn56.3.o74a73 2012 809′.933585—dc23 2011034122 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

F OR R A N J I A N D NAC H I K E TA

contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction: Enlightenment Orientalism

1

Part One: Pseudoethnographies 1. 2.

Fiction/Translation/Transculturation: Marana, Behn, Galland, Defoe

33

Oriental Singularity: Montesquieu, Goldsmith, Hamilton

76

Part Two: Transcultural Allegories 3.

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations: Fontenelle, Bidpai, Swift, Voltaire

115

4.

Libertine Orientalism: Prévost, Crébillon, Diderot

160

5.

The Oriental Tale as Transcultural Allegory: Manley, Haywood, Sheridan, Smollett

202

Conclusion: Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

244

Notes Bibliography Index

255 301 329

vii

figu r es

0.1

The genie Aladdin (1730) 23

1.1

Title page to The Turkish Spy (1730) 42

1.2

Frontispieces to The Turkish Spy (1730, 1770) 46–47

1.3

Scheherezade and Schahriar in bed (1714)

3.1

Frontispiece to A Plurality of Worlds (1702) 121

52

3.2

Pedigree of Bidpai literature (1888)

131

3.3

The Tortoise and the Geese (1601)

133

4.1

Title page to Tanzaï et Néadarné (1740) 163

4.2

Frontispiece to Le sopha, conte moral, part 1 (1749)

4.3

Mangogul’s dream (1748)

4.4

Zuleïman and Zaïdé (1748) 192

190

5.1

Title page to Adventures of Eovaai (1736) 221

5.2

Frontispiece to History of Nourjahad (1798) 233

ix

178

ack now ledgments

I

would fi rst like to thank the most crucial colleagues and institutions for their support. Without them a scholarly book of this nature could be barely conceived, let alone be brought to fruition. Nancy Armstrong and Len Tennenhouse invited me to give a talk at Brown University on Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai more than a decade ago, since which time I have profited immensely from their generosity and friendship, given that they are now my cherished colleagues at Duke University. Subsequently, Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia convinced me to write an essay on Marana’s L’espion turc for their excellent Blackwell anthology on the eighteenth-century novel, and Anthony Strugnell and Frédéric Ogée invited me to talk about Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets at the Clark Library. Another invitation to the Clark Library came from Felicity Nussbaum and Saree Makdisi, this time to talk about The Arabian Nights and, more specifically, Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad. These four invitations, all of which led to dry runs rehearsing different arguments for the book in article form, are probably the most responsible for germinating this book. The book did have earlier roots: I was shocked to notice on my CV that I gave a talk titled “Wresting the Oriental Tale from a National-Realist Canon” in 1996 at the ASECS meeting in Austin, Texas, when I remember paying a visit to the Johnson (Lyndon, not Samuel) Presidential Library in the august company of Michael McKeon, with whom, incidentally, during a GEMCS conference, I visited the Dallas Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. I depart considerably from Michael’s model for the novel, but his work is an inspiration nonetheless. Without a doubt, institutional support was also extremely important at crucial stages. I thank the John Carter Brown Library, where I combined xi

xii

acknowledgments

a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2006–7, during which time some early portions of the manuscript began to see the light. A significant push came in August 2008, when I enjoyed a blissfully productive month on the banks of Lake Como, drafting another sixty pages under the auspices of the Bellagio Study Center, run by the Rockefeller Foundation. Over all this time, I thank Duke University for its generous research support and the considerable intellectual exchange with colleagues here, especially Fredric Jameson, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, David Aers, Maureen Quilligan, Alberto Moreiras, Cathy Davidson, Grant Farrel, Charlotte Sussman, Philip Stewart, Miche`le Longino, Marianna Torgovnick, Jennifer Thorn, and Ian Baucom. I would like to thank the many graduate students and undergraduates in my courses around this topic over the years at the University of Utah and the University of Washington, and over the last decade at Duke University. They have inspired me to make a case for the oriental tale, and I hope very much that time will show that I have played some small role in the scholarly directions in which they embarked. In addition to those mentioned above, I thank the many institutions (and the individuals representing them) that invited me to lecture on the topic of this book and thus allowed me to refi ne the ideas within it. Of course, many opportunities to present on this topic came my way from the Modern Language Association, the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, and the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies. I gave individual lectures on the topic of this book (in roughly chronological order) at the Center for Early Modern Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Department of English at the University of New Hampshire; the Humanities Center at the University of Minnesota; the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University; Academia Sinica in Taiwan; the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of Michigan; the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Rutgers University; the American Council for Learned Societies annual convention in Montreal; the Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M University; the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy; the Department of English at the University of Chicago; the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park; the Humanities Center at Rice University; the Department of Classics at Dartmouth University; the Department of English at Yale University; the New York University Institute for Advanced Studies at Abu Dhabi; the Department of English at the University

acknowledgments

xiii

of Pennsylvania; the Oxford University English faculty; the Humanities Institute at Portland State University; and the Department of English at Harvard University. For these invitations and for stimulating conversations and discussions during these visits, I thank Paddy Fumerton, William Warner, Sean Moore, Daniel Brewer, Keya Ganguly, Tim Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Franco Moretti, Hsiung Ping-chen, Misty Anderson, John Zomchick, Lee Schlesinger, Michael Warner, Michael McKeon, Jonathan Kramnick, Pauline Yu, Mita Chowdhury, Pilar Palaciá, Bruce Ackerman, Bill Brown, Jim Chandler, Leela Gandhi, Laura Rosenthal, Caroline Levander, Betty Joseph, Mimi Kim, David Mazzotta, Margaret Williamson, Phiroze Vasunia, Emily Greenwood, Dan Selden, Nicholas Allen, C. J. Rawson, Annabel Patterson, Jill Campbell, Marina Warner, Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, Ferial Ghazoul, Laurent Châtel, Suvir Kaul, Ania Loomba, David Kazanjian, Toni Bowers, Ros Ballaster, Ankhi Mukherjee, Leerom Medovoi, Bill Knight, Marjorie Garber, and Leah Price. In addition to several eighteenth-century colleagues already mentioned above, for a book in eighteenth-century studies I have a host of colleagues to thank in the field broadly defi ned. At various times over the decade, I have had the pleasure of significant intellectual interaction with a range of scholars through conferences, private correspondence, and other mechanisms of scholarly exchange, including the most old-fashioned way of all, reading work in print. All these encounters, whether in person or on the page, have helped me defi ne this project—sometimes in intellectual alliance and sometimes in playful opposition: Ala Alryyes, Ros Ballaster, John Bender, Anne Berger, Jane Brown, Laura Brown, Marshall Brown, Daniel Carey, Roger Chartier, Tom Conley, Lennard Davis, Wai Chee Dimock, Tom DiPiero, Madeleine Dobie, Markman Ellis, Lincoln Faller, Lynn Festa, Catherine Gallagher, Mitchell Greenberg, J. Paul Hunter, Christian Jouhaud, Tom Lockwood, Deidre Lynch, Bob Markley, Kevin McLaughlin, Christopher Miller, Bella Mirabella, Ourida Mostefai, David Porter, Balachandra Rajan, Tilottama Rajan, John Richetti, Pierre SaintAmand, Haun Saussy, Wolfram Schmidgen, Rajani Sudan, Helen Thompson, James Thompson, Christian Thorne, Katie Trumpener, Hans Turley (sorely missed), Cynthia Wall, Chi-ming Yang, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell. For permission to use sections from earlier rehearsals of arguments finalized in this book, I thank Blackwell Publishing for portions of chapter 1; Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century for a section of chapter 4; and Novel: A Forum for Fiction and Oxford University Press for portions of

xiv

acknowledgments

chapter 5. For the reproduction and permission of images, I am grateful to the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University; the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan; the British Library; the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; and the University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable inspiration provided by the inventors of postcolonial theory for this project, most especially Edward Said (whose specter hovers over it, given the topic), with whom I had the good fortune to exchange ideas on a couple of occasions. Over the years, I have also been lucky to be in conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Mieke Bal, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. I have also benefited from excellent research assistance over the years. Many thanks to Hollianna Bryan, Bill Knight, Anna Gibson, and Jackie Cowan for countless trips to the library and grappling with the many electronic versions of the manuscript and the bibliography. I owe Justin Izzo a deep debt of gratitude for his invaluable assistance over the last year, dealing with every aspect from fi nding sources to checking translations, and from seeking permissions to helping with the index. Alan Thomas and Randy Petilos were astute editors who believed in this project. Of course, I want to thank the three anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press, who were copious in their praise but also incisive in their constructive criticism, which has undoubtedly improved the argument and expanded my range of reference. Ruth Goring has been a boon as a manuscript editor with a deft eye and a sure touch. Thanks to Andrea Guinn for a beautifully suggestive book design. Any remaining failings in this book are my own. Finally, scholarship is frequently conducted by fi nding time in excess of regular working hours, time that is snatched away from intimacies owed to the nearest and dearest. I dedicate this book to the two most important people in my life: my life partner of two decades, Ranji Khanna, and our darling son, Nachiketa Kumara.

introduction

Enlightenment Orientalism

Enlightenment is Man emerging from his self-incurred immaturity [selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit]. —Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784) Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defi ned starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. . . . My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce— the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. . . . European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. —Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

K

ant’s bootstrap defi nition of Enlightenment is Bildungsroman in miniature: humanity emerges from immaturity (Unmündigkeit, or unworldliness) into rational power, becoming an end unto itself after having previously undermined itself (selbst verschuldeten). There is no happier prospect for human awakening. Said’s description of Orientalism tells a gothic story, that of Europe’s will-to-power over others. While the motto of Enlightenment for Kant was the Horatian sapere aude, or “dare to know,”

1

2

introduction

Said’s narrative heralds a different outcome, an imperial world with losers, winners, scapegoats, and surrogates. Both Kant and Said focus on the epistemological productivity of their respective objects. Enlightenment is thought of in monist and meditative terms, as a form of individualizing self-improvement by Kant, whereas Said’s Orientalism is caught in a dualistic logic of self and other, whereby the Occident’s domination of the Orient launches into maniacal hyperproductivity. Notice the proliferation of adverbs describing Europe’s production of the Orient according to Said: “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.” Why is Orientalism so fecund? These two defi nitions, of Enlightenment and Orientalism, also crystallize historiographical narratives of modernity. The scientific discovery and political freedom promised by Enlightenment contrast starkly with the imperial conquest and racial oppression delivered by Orientalism as handmaiden of European imperialism. Of course, the combination of the two, to the extent that this could take place in the last two centuries, would be to the detriment of Enlightenment rather than the amelioration of Orientalism. The critiques of Enlightenment since Horkheimer and Adorno’s attack have tended to cast the Enlightenment in terms similar to those advanced by Said about Orientalism. According to the Frankfurt School, the Enlightenment instrumentalized knowledge in a manner that led to fascism and the death camps of the Holocaust. Functionalizing society and objectifying human activity, the Enlightenment was also reduced to a facade for will-to-power, derived from Michel Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche. Foucault’s concepts of pouvoir/savoir developed in Discipline and Punish and discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge—combined with his own critique of the Enlightenment—already operated as the theoretical background to Said’s account of Orientalism’s domination of the darker races. In this regard, Orientalism sounds awfully close to Enlightenment: “as a cultural apparatus, Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge.”1 There is no gainsaying the broad claims made by Said about the ongoing use of Orientalism to enhance the imperial management of subject peoples since the turn of the nineteenth century, a trend that continues well into contemporary Occidental geopolitics in relation to Islam. However, what would we discover if we picked apart the lead-up to a shift of such global magnitude? Was the Enlightenment always doomed? Did all previous curiosity about the East inevitably lead to negative forms of Orientalism? In trying to answer these questions, this book puts forward a hypothesis that

Enlightenment Orientalism

3

might sound heretical in some quarters. It follows the itinerary of European knowledge regarding the East influenced by the utopian aspirations of Enlightenment more than materialist and political interest. Enlightenment interrogation was not innocent—no knowledge ever is—but it was a complex questioning, with multiple objectives and orientations, “a state of intellectual tension rather than a sequence of similar propositions.”2 Not just bent on the domination of the other but also aimed at mutual understanding across cultural differences, for Enlightenment the self was under critique as much as any “other.” More important, Orientalism could not have constituted “a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient” until the development of imperial bureaucracies. Rather than assume that the eighteenth century is a “pre-Orientalist” stage leading inevitably to a racist nineteenth century, we need to ask if other modes of apprehension existed earlier. Rejecting the consensus that had dated the “high” Enlightenment as culminating in the late eighteenth century, Jonathan Israel has pointed to a “radical” Enlightenment that preceded it by at least a century, through the underground circulation of texts by Spinoza, Bayle, Fontenelle, Toland, and eventually, Diderot across Europe. 3 Consider the discussion in Simon Tyssot de Patot’s Adventures of Jacques Massé (1714), where the hero, imprisoned in Goa, meets a Chinese prisoner who had once been a Catholic but now teaches that all men are equal and abjures Christianity in favor of an explicitly stated universalism.4 The critique of Christian theology intersected with Islamophilia; for instance, Henry Stubbe’s unpublished manuscript on The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism (1671) fed into deist defenses of Islam and appreciations of Muhammad as a Promethean protagonist, such as John Toland’s Nazarenus (1718), Henri de Boulainvillers’s Vie de Mahomet (1730), and Edward Gibbon’s famously positive account of Islam in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88).5 Such examples suggest that a transcultural, cosmopolitan, and Enlightenment-inflected Orientalism existed at least as an alternative strain before “Saidian” Orientalism came about. As argued by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, the Enlightenment is not just a philosophical position-taking but an institutional event in the history of mediation, a time and a place, as well as a mode of interaction entailing the creation of a new epistemological infrastructure when new genres and formats for the presentation of knowledge were explored and new associational practices developed for the collation of information. New protocols came about, including “the postal principle” by which anyone can address anyone, public credit, and copyright, all of which satu-

4

introduction

rated knowledge production.6 Or as John Guillory extends this argument, the mediations created by the Enlightenment entailed an understanding of distance, transmission, and absence as operational between the poles of communication, whether between individuals, objects of analysis, or knowledge systems.7 Taking on this insight, we can propose that genres are to be understood not just as containers for information but rather as apparatuses of mediation that traverse social distance, enable cultural transmission, and make absence productive of new forms and new media. As Guillory argues, forms of communication are at stake rather than just “representations.” But if this is so, we may also wonder whether these thematic excavations around distance, transmission, and absence extend outside traditional European boundaries to configure extranational referents, incorporate recalcitrant bodies, and explore forms of cosmopolitanism that address other civilizations through the aspirations of science and philosophy. What appears in view when communication is taken to the limit, then, is the complex phenomenon of a postcolonial Enlightenment.8 As we will come to see, the oriental tale should be understood as a bravura genre operating under Enlightenment mediation and postcolonial reconstruction. This book argues that imaginative fiction, just as much as scholarly disquisitions or mainstream philology, defi ned European understandings of cultures that were seemingly foreign but that shared the past in ways that needed expert explanation. Oriental tales, pseudoethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political utopias speculated about a largely imaginary East. This imagination was experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist. And unlike nineteenth-century Orientalism that, in Said’s words, “overrode the Orient,” this type overrode Occidental readers. These variable fictions were immensely popular, devoured especially by French and British reading publics. The experimentation came to an end, however, partly out of generic exhaustion and partly as a result of a rising nationalist tide that combined self-contemplative narcissism with intense xenophobia. Enlightenment Orientalism is the term that I propose for this nebulous form of transcultural fiction that interrogated settled assumptions. Enlightenment Orientalism was very much an imaginative Orientalism, circulating images of the East that were nine parts invented and one part referential, but it would be anachronistic to deem these images ideological, as they did not tend principally toward domination of the East in any single register. These fictions opposed the domestic yoke brought by novel practitioners, who eventually triumphed as translations and fabulist forms declined and oriental tales were downgraded as morally unacceptable.

Enlightenment Orientalism

5

However, there was a strong component of Enlightenment science within some of these Orientalist fictions. Within the context of what Paul Hazard famously described in his book La crise de la conscience européenne, oriental tales often featured attempts to criticize European cultural practices as irrational by reference to non-European observers; they projected Europe onto the Orient and vice versa in order to make larger inductions about sexuality, religion, and politics; and they expressed a strong desire to understand civilizational differences both relativistically and universally. Did a universal human nature exist, or were there only incommensurable cultural varieties with their relative value systems? Many of these fictional accounts imagined the Orient as superior to the Occident, even as they titillated European readers with armchair voyagings and vicarious imaginings that sometimes bore little relation to realities in those countries. Deist Christian allegories blended with Islamic and Hindu myths. Exoticism as a term that characterizes and dismisses this interest does not even begin to explain the great hold of these gestures of comparison across cultures, not just for desultory readers but for serious philosophers and incipient social scientists. Enlightenment Orientalism had among its practitioners some very significant eighteenth-century French fiction writers, including Galland, Marana, Fontenelle, Pétis, Montesquieu, Hamilton, Crébillon, Prévost, Voltaire, and Diderot; its English wing can be represented by Behn, Defoe, Swift, Haywood, Montagu, Goldsmith, Johnson, Smollett, Sheridan, Beckford, and a host of minor writers who are largely unread today except by eighteenth-century specialists (and not very much by them). Enlightenment Orientalism occurred largely outside the Whiggish “rise of the novel” thesis that tells a very selective story about fictional genres. Orientalism does not, of course, stop with the Enlightenment, given its full flowering in the Romantic period and the long nineteenth century, but the Orientalism of Byron, Goethe, and Flaubert is beyond the purview of this study, as are the vast areas of Orientalist-inflected drama, poetry, painting, and music. I stay with Orientalist fiction’s intercitationality and desire for translocality and take as my focus the generic concerns that arise around narrative fiction, rather than documenting and exploring the geographical gamut of cultures, races, and religions that the construct of Orientalism addresses, from southern Europe to North Africa and from West, South, and East Asia to indigenous America.9 It is important for scholars to reconsider how Enlightenment Orientalism resisted the rise of the novel within its moment and the extent to which we still need to clear some intellectual space from naturalized accounts of the European novel, which tend to ignore forms of paralitera-

6

introduction

ture that do not support the same old story of the nation and modernity triumphing over the rest of the world and over older forms of storytelling. While the novel came to be acknowledged as the preeminent fictional form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was taken up and imitated in a number of other regions of the world, we have to understand that domestic realism was very much a fledgling genre relative to the romance, which for many centuries in Europe dealt in both the long ago and the faraway.10 The early phases of the novel successfully invert this relationship, embracing history and the local and then drawing boundaries around the national to expel the foreign and the transcultural. While the novel did battle with various kinds of romance, the oriental tale was an alternative genre to the domestic novel—as were others before it, such as the lunar voyage, the travel narrative, and the criminal biography. Thus scholars need to reexamine the system of eighteenth-century fictional genres, their circulation, and ways that relative hierarchies have been altered to impose certain outcomes. This book will pay close attention to individual works of Enlightenment Orientalism to assess their narrative strategies and their appeal to readers. In writing this book, I have not aimed for comprehensive coverage of the entire range of writers and genres but have highlighted particular texts that make visible the deficiencies of dominant paradigms in literary history, particularly that of “the rise of the novel” and its homogenizing consequences. I am grateful to significant studies by predecessors that provide interdisciplinary and archival coverage of Enlightenment Orientalism, obviating the need for me to conduct an exhaustive survey of all the texts in the field.11 In a previous study titled Tropicopolitans, I named the ambivalent Orientalisms that circulated under the sign of empire levantinizations, or forms of tropological representation that used the East with the goals of xenophilia as well as xenophobia. For writers such as Mary Wortley Montagu, a postclassical synthesis was at stake. Montagu wanted full passage from Europe to the Orient, not just physically but in terms of cultural identity, even as others such as Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and William Beckford ascribed various negative attributes such as despotism, terror, and surveillance to this Orient. In yet another work, Guru English, I analyzed how Orientalism led to self-Orientalization by the colonized, resulting in ambivalent and reappropriative forms of religious cosmopolitanism. In this book I confi ne myself to the narrative complexities of eighteenthcentury fictional Orientalism in English and French. Some of its forms are

Enlightenment Orientalism

7

hard to pin down, as these texts shift from allegory to realism to fantasy and oscillate from popular entertainment to philosophical analysis. For all these reasons, Enlightenment Orientalism is an open-ended thought-experiment. To what extent can we recover lost forms of reading, and can we recuperate transcultural utopian potential as glimmers of a different thought process in the past? What is to be gained in resisting the rise of the novel in this way? Are there new scholarly forms of cosmopolitanism and comparativism that can avoid the worst excesses of the national literature paradigm, even as we mine those very archives for fictional forms resistant to the value system that retroactively coded and destroyed them? There is more at stake than just documentation of how the oriental tale, inflected by Enlightenment Orientalism, and other fictional genres resisted the domestic realist novel; to some extent it behooves us to reenact that resistance in the process of devising new investigative methodologies. Such scholarship might be seen as fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of a lost cause—as it can be argued that the novel has already “won”—or, alternately, it might break the existing paradigm of nationbased novel studies and fi nd its way to a global comparativism that is not seduced by modernity narratives rooted in a poor evaluation of the literary-historical and cultural evidence.12 Having made these slightly polemical remarks, I should add that my interpretive strategies have identified me with the school of the radical contingency, as I believe that acts of reading make new meanings emerge from texts. I focus on nuance, textual individuation, and what we might call slow (but not just close) reading, rather than old-fashioned historical contextualization or the new-fangled school of distant reading that has taken novel criticism by storm.13 In their influential anthology Exoticism and the Enlightenment, G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter upheld the teleological interpretation of Orientalism even while acknowledging different phases of the phenomenon. Though they would prefer to believe that “the line from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century is continuous,” they agree that “arguably, however, there was a moment of equilibrium in the eighteenth century [when] Europe and Asia were still fi nely balanced”—precisely because Europe had still not established its sway over China, Japan, Turkey, or India. Rousseau and Porter suggest that at this time, “because of the power of Enlightenment pens, Europe itself was sufficiently self-critical and free from bigotry to be able to confront other cultures, admittedly not as equals, nor even necessarily on their own terms, but at least as alternative versions of

8

introduction

living.”14 To this acknowledgment we might add that fiction powerfully took the part of the ne plus ultra of history, and Enlightenment Orientalism became a transcultural conjectural history located within identifiable geographies, where experimental antifoundationalism allowed multiple epistemologies and metanarratives: “the anthropological fantasies of the philosophes did not so much time-travel backwards or forwards but sideways.”15 Enlightenment Orientalism increased its influence by featuring moral philosophy as well as libertine politics. I would argue, contra Said’s statement in the epigraph, that Enlightenment Orientalism was not “a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient” but a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient—dreaming with it by constructing and translating fictions about it, pluralizing views of it, inventing it, by reimagining it, unsettling its meaning, brooding over it. In short, Enlightenment Orientalism was a Western style for translating, anatomizing, and desiring the Orient. And without examining Enlightenment Orientalism as a fictional mode, one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—both the novel and the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Said acknowledged as much with his more nuanced appreciation of European literary aesthetics in his later monograph Culture and Imperialism.16 Moreover, there is a repercussion to this claim for genre history: so subversive a position did Enlightenment Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, reading, or criticizing novels could do so without taking account of the limitations and opportunities for form and content imposed by it. In brief, because of Enlightenment Orientalism the novel was not (and is not) a free genre of autochthonous modernity. Novelistic culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off as domestic authenticity against Enlightenment Orientalism, and against other forms of romance and prose fiction that served as surrogates and even underground generic cousins. By calling this fiction Enlightenment Orientalism we can seek an alternative to the implicit value judgments contained in terms such as pre-Orientalism, pseudo-Orientalism, and protonovel. I prefer Enlightenment Orientalism as the tag for the aesthetic charge presented by the works I study to demonstrate their doubled and doubling nature: inside and outside the nation, self-critical and also xenotropic, philosophical and also fantasmatic.17 The East was a source of great anxiety among Europeans when the size and power of large empires such as the Persian, the Chinese, the Mughal,

Enlightenment Orientalism

9

and the Ottoman were measured at different moments in history. Earlier forms of Orientalism oscillated from recognizing universal sameness to positing ideas of unbridgeable cultural difference. Enlightenment Orientalism is somewhat different from Romantic and nineteenth-century Orientalism, as it gains imaginative license where it does not have state power or corporate executive authority. Desiring fictions are not colonial propaganda or imperial blueprints, even if they can be refashioned as such after the fact. Nonetheless, there is a complication concerning the imagination of the Orient as a precursor. Does thinking of the Orient as a past automatically lead to the structure of thought that Johannes Fabian has termed “nonallochronic,” which could be functionalized into inferiority and superiority, aligned with East and West, antiquity and modernity? It certainly can be, and indeed largely was, by the Romantic period. However, the promise (and the cheat) of the neoclassical period was the imagining of a number of parallel antiquities, including Egyptian, Persian, Arab, Babylonian, Chinese, and Indian civilizations alongside European culture’s Greek, Roman, and Jewish origins. Before fl irting with the idea that all cultural discourses of defi nition such as Orientalism are necessary for the functional ontology of the Western self, we should consider that the oedipal attitude that European observers developed toward global pasts could be traced to a European event that eventually led to multiple global consequences. The French Revolution and its oedipalized overthrow of the ancien régime gave the ideology of modernity an unprecedented boost, as all ancient cultures and polities could now be deemed headed for the dustbin of history. To be older was no longer to be venerable; precedence no longer automatically meant deference; and hallowed origins did not always result in meritorious descent. The peoples and cultures of the East have been massively denigrated and dismissed as unenlightened by hegemonic EuroAmerican thought all the way since the nineteenth century—evidenced in the embattled “clash of civilizations” rhetoric emanating from Samuel Huntington and his school in response to geopolitical developments in the Middle East and the rise of neopatriarchal Islamic fundamentalism. The paradox before us is that many of the same sites now seen as repositories of ignorance, fanaticism, and underdevelopment were seen as sources of fiction, culture, wisdom, precedence, and even enlightenment (of Gnostic, mystical, and even Spinozistic varieties, if not quite the fruits of Kantian science) well into the eighteenth century. These salutary ideas about the East were no doubt confused, vague, and highly distorted, and they existed alongside political and religious hostilities toward these regions that went

10

introduction

back to the Middle Ages and earlier. But until these confl icting attitudes of xenophilia and xenophobia were reappropriated by a nineteenth-century imperial machine and its neocolonial successors, images and ideas of the Orient could not be easily functionalized as part of a homogeneous discourse with a singular politics. It would be highly anachronistic to reorganize a confused welter of ideas and identifications developing from Renaissance travel and slow religious secularization into a teleological template that led to the eventual outcome of empire. The Oriental Renaissance had opened up the collective vision eastward, and there was a fictional efflorescence that took up that challenge in multiple directions. Only afterward did imperial ambitions reorganize under a scholarly impetus creating the corporate and state institutions that Said unerringly identified as the sordid legacy of nineteenth-century empire. By staying with some of these fictions that are sometimes bewildering to modern sensibilities, this book aims to read Enlightenment Orientalism as enabling a vibrant interrogation and critique of predecessor narratives by citation, parody, and juxtaposition. Enlightenment Orientalism should be regarded as being not so much an ideology as a hybrid mode that refutes nascent ideologies of autochthony and parthenogenesis, whether these concern the genesis of Orientalist attitudes toward Europe’s others, the emergence of proprietary ideas of Enlightenment, or the institutionalization of the novel. As a fictional mode, Enlightenment Orientalism corrects the essentialist and dualistic thesis that orchestrated Said’s polemic against entrenched academic interests, even as it enables a sympathetically nuanced reformulation of his altogether useful critique of the politics of knowledge.

FROM RENAISSANCE ORIENTALISM TO ENLIGHTENMENT ORIENTALISM Another way to think of the currently unfolding interest in the history of world literature would be through the suppressed past of Orientalism, without which such an object of analysis would be inconceivable.18 A study of Enlightenment Orientalism can only partially begin the task of dealing with the Orientalist Enlightenment, perhaps a loose redescription of what Raymond Schwab termed in his book The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East.19 Schwab’s original study in French, which preceded Said’s manifesto by a couple of decades, benignly laid out the curiosities and cross-cultural interests that led to a burgeoning Oriental scholarship in Europe from the eighteenth century, especially

Enlightenment Orientalism

11

in Germany, a country that was largely uninvolved at that time in imperial adventures like those of Britain and France. Imperial conquest turned Orientalism malefic. An interest in the Near East goes back a long way in Europe, with the understanding of both confl ict and coexistence, whether that of the Greeks with the Persians and the Egyptians who preceded them, or the Romans with the Carthaginians and the Byzantines, or the period of the Crusades, when Christianity went to battle with Islam. At the same time, the internal heterodoxy of Eastern gnosticism existed continuously despite Europe’s Christian cultural exterior. The Oriental Renaissance was in part a sudden expansion of the geography of what counted as Oriental for the West. Writing about the origin of romances in 1670, the bishop of Avranches, Pierre-Daniel Huet, defi nes Orientals as “Egyptians, Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Syrians,” but just a few decades later Antoine Galland, the famous transcreator of The Arabian Nights, has capaciously expanded the Oriental category to include “not only Arabs and Persians but also Turks and Tartars, and almost all of the peoples of Asia all the way up to China, Muslims and pagans or idolaters.”20 Under different circumstances Schwab’s contrapuntal Oriental Renaissance could easily have become mainstream.21 There was considerable interest since the Middle Ages in a pan-Asian oriental religious system, a doctrina orientalis that imaginatively connected Buddhism with Brahmanism, Pythagoras and Plato with Hindu metaphysics and reincarnation. Urs App perhaps overstates his case when he says that the idea of pan-Asian religion or doctrine is much more important than colonialism for the understanding of Orientalism, but his argument is an excellent indication that multiple lines of inquiry have been ignored.22 In his defense of fellow Orientalists, Robert Irwin indicates that “Orientalism developed in the shade of the much grander discourse of the Bible and of the classics.” I would want to embrace this insight strongly without sharing Irwin’s unnecessarily reactionary bias that Said’s Orientalism is “a work of malignant charlatanry.”23 Orientalist, in any case, is a late eighteenth-century term (the term is listed by the OED as appearing fi rst in English in 1779 and somewhat later in French), but the interest in the Near East only connects Europe with its civilizational past. Renaissance Orientalism attempted to reconcile biblical chronologies with nonbiblical ones, even as Petrarchan humanism resolutely turned away from the Arab learning and Averroism that had dominated medieval European universities. At the same time, the continued existence of the gnostic and

12

introduction

Neoplatonist traditions through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance brought versions of Egypt, Persia, and even India to Europe, while China was already represented through Marco Polo and Mandeville. Irwin cannot brook fictional forays into the Orient, committed as he is to the idea that Orientalism is a defensible scholarly epistemology. This study, on the other hand, takes the modifier Enlightenment to qualify Orientalist fiction as its main target. This limits the phenomena so that we may study them better, as eighteenth-century Orientalism was incredibly rich, involving dramatic, poetic, and many other nonfictional genres. Fiction, however, was Enlightenment Orientalism’s most prominent expression, especially from the early eighteenth century onward, when The Arabian Nights was translated by Galland and became a household title. In the early twenty-fi rst century, scholarship on the Renaissance has roundly rejected anachronistic interpretations that imagine English and French national ideology as already confidently racist and anticipatory of empire. The Mediterranean littoral consisted of a series of interactions, frictions, and transculturations. Ethnic identities at this time were still fluid, racializing yet not rigidly racist. Facing the constant interchangeability of self and other, texts of this period are much more concerned with European travelers’ “turning Turk” than self-assured about dominating these culturally hybrid zones, as current-day observers might imagine. Cautioning scholars against the “critical fallacy of back formation,” Daniel Vitkus rejects the binaristic understandings of Orientalism that have been rampant, especially when projecting back from later periods. Important contributions such as Nabil Matar’s show massive evidence for an equal exchange of perspectives when Muslims and Christians interacted through travel, commerce, and confl ict in the early modern period. Yet another scholar, Jonathan Burton, exposes the problem of one-sided archives and one-way emplotment that vitiates accounts of exchange between European and Arabo-Ottoman spheres.24 An important moment to consider as background to the development of Orientalist fiction is the creation of the polyglot Bibles in Alcalá, Antwerp, Paris, and fi nally London in the seventeenth century. Earlier versions of Orientalism, as a matter of fact, can be described as forms of the antiquarianization of biblical scholarship.25 The polyglot Bibles could be understood as inadvertently secularizing history even while hoping to advance it sacrally—this was decidedly the path that Giambattista Vico refused to take in La scienza nuova (1724), recognizing that secular chronology would win out in a straight competition with sacred history and therefore the only way to ensure the survival of the latter would be to build

Enlightenment Orientalism

13

a fi rewall between the two. Brian Walton’s Biblia sacra polyglotta (1657) juxtaposed biblical passages in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to their equivalents in Ethiopic, Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, and even, supposedly, Chinese. Nine languages in different scripts were displayed on the same page throughout the multiple volumes, and the introduction demonstrated an even greater number of scripts and languages. This was a technical triumph for the art of printing as much as it was a feather in the cap of the comparative erudition that I am identifying as Renaissance and Enlightenment Orientalism. Oriental studies by biblical scholars were attempts to justify the rise of Christianity and biblical accounts of cosmology as unimpeachable; ironically, these studies only generated greater doubt about such a story. The Jesuits had claimed to discover Nestorian Christians in China on the basis of a thousand-year-old stele found in Xi’an. But as for instance in Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata, an inscription referring to Da Qin (the Outer Qin empire) was mistranslated as referring to Da Xi’an, the heavenly empire, which supposedly referred to Rome. Nonetheless, Jesuits from Matteo Ricci to Martino Martini documented the marvels of the Middle Kingdom described as Regio Serica or “Silk Land.” The illustrations are terribly confused, as Chinese peasants are portrayed with Phrygian caps as if they were peoples of the Mediterranean.26 Around the same time, the burgeoning interest in human universality amidst contact with other peoples led to John Webb’s An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language Of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (1669), a text that explores a kind of literal Noachism, tracing the biblical flood to the shores of India and China and speculating that Noah’s teachings had made Chinese order monotheistic, monarchical, and patriarchal, thereby encouraging scholarship that reconciled Chinese chronology with Mosaic history. Identifying the Chinese emperor Yao as Noah, Webb dismisses as spurious all Chinese annals that record emperors before Yao. In order to accommodate all these new chronological possibilities, speculations such as Webb’s needed to replace the Vulgate version of the Bible with the Septuagint. The Chinese language ends up symbolizing originary simplicity in the manner of antique Hebrew, which Orientalist Guillaume Postel (1510–81) recommended as an universal language.27 Postel’s creative syncretism took the form of positing the Brahmans of India as Abrahamanes (or the sons of Abraham), an idea Isaac Newton picked up and repeated.28 Archbishop Huet, in Demonstratio evangelica, would seek to hypothesize that Moses (rather than Noah or Abraham) was the universal founder of all the world’s religions. As one more example of a naive but well-meaning philo-Orientalism,

14

introduction

consider Jonathan Swift’s patron William Temple, whose 1690 tracts, including An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning and Of Heroic Virtue, argued for ancient Greek learning as deriving from Phoenicia and Egypt, and for the Indian gymnosophist sources of Pythagorean beliefs. Tracing the origins of Western science to magic as practiced by Chaldeans, Egyptians, and Indians, Temple suggests that ancient Brahmins were “perpetual conservers of knowledge and story.”29 Asserting that the conventional European interest in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome was designating “but a limited compass of earth that leaves out many vast regions of the world . . . [that] yet have a right to come in for their voice,” Temple proceeds to make an amateur’s case for four additional civilizations whose stories needed to be told, those of China, Peru, Scythia, and Arabia, civilizations that had at least equaled and perhaps exceeded Europe’s accomplishments. The point of the exercise is to prove that “human nature is the same in these remote, as well as the other more known and celebrated parts of the world” and that “different governments [were] framed and cultivated by as great reaches and strength of reason and of wisdom as any of ours [i.e., Europe’s].”30 Temple’s one-world universalism wishes to fi nd “that the same causes produce every where the same effects; and that the same honours and obedience are in all places but consequences or tributes paid to the same heroic virtue or transcendent genius, in what parts soever, or under what climates of the world, it fortunes to appear.”31 Examples such as the polyglot Bible, Webb’s desire to trace the origin of the West to China, and Temple’s celebration of several non-Western civilizations tell us that the purview of seventeenth-century Enlightenment Orientalism was indistinguishable from what we call classical studies today, and inseparable from universalist and cosmopolitan aspirations. Eastern origin legends were thoroughly confused with the mythology of Western European zones, such as Ireland, leading to ongoing speculation about interactions between Celticism and Orientalism. 32 However, such positive projections also functioned analogously to the temporal postcolonial form that historian Gyan Prakash has identified as “archaic modernity”; in other words, the past needed to be rediscovered—or even invented—in order to fi ll a genealogical gap that would make whole the present. During the early European Enlightenment, this projected past was one that was invented to reunite worldly differences through a holistic solution that suggested anthropological and divine monogenesis. Such a form of Enlightenment Orientalism refutes the exoticization peddled by medieval compilations such as Mandeville and Marco Polo, and Romantic examples of Orientalism that will later feature moral or civilizational inferiority.

Enlightenment Orientalism

15

Adiaphora, a principle of biblical interpretation, could be singled out as taking a broad survey and comparing human variety amorally within a theodicy of human civilization. Given these philological underpinnings, it is a startling surprise that later Orientalisms got hopelessly intertwined with racial separatism. Along with Hebrew and Chinese, Arabic was a candidate language in the search for a philosophical universalism during the seventeenth century. There was a second wave of interest in Arabic science, philosophy, and literature during the period of the Royal Society, a counterwave to any hostility to Islam lingering from the medieval period that is relevant for this book’s attempt to uncover an Enlightenment Orientalism. 33 A major fictional development that has been insufficiently acknowledged in nationalist histories of fiction was the vogue for ibn Tufayl’s (d. 1185) Hayy bin Yaqzan. A literary bestseller through various translations during its period, Hayy is a desert island narrative of a solitary individual that preceded Robinson Crusoe in its experimental exploration of empiricism and spiritual knowledge. Either abandoned as an infant or spontaneously generated from the mud, the protagonist is suckled by a doe and grows to maturity through both practical and spiritual exercises gained by empirical interactions with his surroundings. Hayy eventually encounters Absal, another human being seeking wisdom who has come to the island, and they leave the island to encounter human society. Unable to influence others with the relevance of their spiritual discoveries, they return to the island for a life of contemplation until their deaths. This Orientalist example of the natural philosopher was commended by significant Enlightenment figures including Christiaan Huygens, Spinoza, and Leibniz. 34 Meanwhile, Pierre Bayle, advocate of the radical Enlightenment, praised Arab philosophers in his Dictionnaire and hypothesized that the philosophers of the early Abbasid caliphate were proto-Spinozists, continuing the submerged history of clandestine academic Averroism of the medieval period. 35 Hayy is a singularly interesting example of literary transmission. This twelfth-century Arabic text had already made its way into Spanish and significantly influenced Baltasar Gracián’s El criticón (1650–53). The text had an early European presence through a Hebrew translation in the midthirteenth century and a mid-fi fteenth-century Latinization of the Hebrew that was read by Pico della Mirandola. Translated into Latin from the Arabic with a facing-page translation as Philosophus Autodidactus (1671; repr. 1700) by Edward Pococke, the eponymous son of the famous Oxford Arabist responsible for the Orientalist holdings of the Bodleian Li-

16

introduction

brary, Hayy has been identified as a major influence on the empiricist and associationist philosophy of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (written 1670–71, published 1689). Locke, who had significant exposure to Arabic at Westminster School and at Oxford, was a pupil of the senior Pococke, the Laudian Professor of Arabic and Regius Professor of Hebrew. Locke later became the junior Pococke’s tutor. Hayy was translated from Latin into English by the Quaker George Keith as Hai Ebn Yakdan (1674), by Anglo-Catholic George Ashwell as Hai Eb’n Yockdan (1686), and also anonymously as The History of Josephus the Prince (1696). It was summarized in the Philosophical Translations as “The Feigned History of An Infant Exposed” and was subjected to a range of adaptations. The best-known English translation made directly from the Arabic text was by the Orientalist Simon Ockley, who also later became professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Titled The Improvement of Human Reason (1708), Ockley’s translation seems as significant as the story of Alexander Selkirk for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. 36 The vogue for the text continued with plagiarizations and adaptations in 1722, 1736, 1745, 1761, and 1766.37 Presented with a metafictional preface, the text offers “a Glimpse of the Secret of Secrets,” as ibn Tufayl claims to be revealing esoteric wisdom to a close friend (in Arabic the title means “Alive, Son of Aware”). This theme of the secret wisdom of Eastern philosophy (al-hikmat almashriqiyyah) is taken up more colloquially by several Enlightenment Orientalist texts as an organizational tic even though the modern texts tend to inflect such wisdom politically, from the conspiratorial atmosphere that infects the activities of Mahmut, the eponymous L’espion turc, to Montesquieu’s mysterious assertion concerning “the secret chain” that could disambiguate Lettres persanes for the undiscerning public. Furthermore, Hayy also foreshadows the thematic interest in a “Vision for the Angelic World” that is a preoccupation of Marana’s and the third volume of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and reminiscent of the cosmological realism behind Fontenelle’s thesis concerning the plurality of worlds, as well as the compassion toward animals explored by Alexander Pope and other writers. Many of these tendencies will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters, but it is interesting how ibn Tufayl’s text radiates outward toward these other discussions. Hayy participates in the genres of spiritual biography and metaphysical allegory. Both philosophical romance and utopian narrative, Hayy provides an ironic parable concerning the origin of fiction by presenting models for its protagonist’s birth through contingent abandonment as well as spontaneous generation (proleptic of narratives of

Enlightenment Orientalism

17

the birth of English fiction with Robinson Crusoe), as well as by the alternative story of Hayy as a foundling sent away by a princess who hid her secret marriage from her brother, suggesting the anatopian arrival of fiction from the East. Through painstaking reconstruction of circumstantial evidence, G. A. Russell has determined that Locke was in close dialogue with the Pocockes and may very well have suggested the title of the Latin translation. Russell has also determined that there was a major impact at Oxford resulting from the circulation of Hayy as “the fi rst psychological novel.”38 While the Quakers might have liked Hayy for its encouragement to tend to an inner spiritual light, Ockley’s translation was in opposition to “enthusiastick” appropriations. Translations such as the influential ones of Hayy worked according to the older principle of translatio or transmission. Texts moved across languages with relative ease and without much explanation, even as multilingual scholars took it upon themselves to disseminate treatises and fictions up through Latin and across various vernaculars. The Arabian Nights, having been transplanted into the European context by Galland’s translation (1704–17), brought to Europe its own notions of Arab, Persian, Indian, and Chinese cultures while introducing unfamiliar narrative techniques with considerable hermeneutic sophistication. Galland’s translation spawned the oriental tale as a secret sharer within a larger structure of the distribution of value among forms of national, transcultural, and fabulistic narrative. The oriental tale—a genre that flourished following the popularity of the French Mille et une nuits and the English Arabian Nights’ Entertainments—is best approached as an artifact written to the specifications of the folktale but with the aims of modernity in mind. Artificially distressed in the manner of fake period furniture, the oriental tale is a simulacrum of traditional forms, with a highly misunderstood yet crucial function in relation to the public culture of the Enlightenment and political modernity. This was true even of Galland’s edition, especially as the most successful free-standing “orphan” tales such as those of Ali Baba and Aladdin (replete with their modernizing and individualist themes) have no known Arabic manuscript antecedents before Galland, and speculation that these later tales are pseudotranslations places Galland in the position of transcreator, if not full-fledged author. 39 Along with Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (supposedly written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian) and Alain René Le Sage’s The Devil on Crutches, The Arabian Nights brought suppressed memories of Arab Spain back into Christian Europe, even as historical encyclopedias proudly featured Turk-

18

introduction

ish and Persian culture.40 The New Orientalism that developed throughout the eighteenth century was not as restricted by the limitations of biblical studies, thereby expanding the sense of universal classicism.

RESISTING THE RISE OF THE NOVEL Even while focusing on fictions that feature the interrogative powers of Enlightenment Orientalism, this book rejects arguments that institutionalize novelistic realism as the telos of eighteenth-century fiction. Counter to the entelechies promoted by Erich Auerbach and Ian Watt that lead the history of fiction from epic and romance origins to mimesis and formal realism, Thomas Pavel has demonstrated that in the longue durée, European fiction highlights the transcendental nature of moral values, establishing norms that precede as well as succeed any assumptions regarding the “naive empiricism” of the senses or factual observations and inferences.41 A vogue for national realism did arise in Britain and France during the middle of the eighteenth century, with texts that processed romance ideas or journalistic facts into psychological interiority. Despite this, Pavel argues that moderate idealism remains the endpoint of the novel up to the present day, well after the significant eighteenth-century encounter with antiidealism (a capacious phase that includes satire, skepticism, psychologism, empiricism, and realism). However, Pavel errs by relegating the oriental tale to the category of “exoticism,” thereby undervaluing the roles played by pseudoethnography and libertinism in fiction before the boundaries of national culture began to be strictly enforced.42 Still, Pavel’s approach could be extended to the oriental tale, as “fiction calls attention to the nonfactual, to the invisible, and to the exemplary.”43 Of course, theories of the novel have moved on from earlier investments in nationalism. For instance, Franco Moretti’s work on the long arc of the novel has expanded our understanding of its scope and range, even though the model assumes intellectual diffusion. So also Pascale Casanova’s important contribution, which treats the novel as a cosmopolitan genre that takes its orders from Paris, with the “minor” traditions— whether within Europe or elsewhere—playing catch-up with literary style dictated by the center. Hegemony is exercised by a grand European tradition for both these critics, even if they encourage a cosmopolitan approach. Though they endorse the relevance of sociology for the novel’s rise, they still make developmentalist moves that track forward from national realism to more sophisticated forms.44 Reintroducing the importance of the fictions of Enlightenment Orientalism would lead to an alternative

Enlightenment Orientalism

19

genealogy that acknowledges the impact of collections of fiction such as The Arabian Nights and a whole host of related texts—whether or not they qualify formally as “novels”—on global literature and culture. The selective partiality of theories that promote the eighteenthcentury English novel has nonetheless had a remarkable effect, producing decades of partisan accounts celebrating Britain’s preeminence in creating the novel form. That there were major generic shifts around English and French fiction under way from the 1680s to the 1760s, in the period from the Princesse de Clèves, The Turkish Spy, and Oroonoko to Clarissa, Émile, and Tristram Shandy cannot be denied, but what is at issue is the overall meaning of these shifts and whether the simultaneous existence and impact of other genres and fictional exemplars are being fully acknowledged. At this time there were multiple realisms—cosmological realism, philosophical naturalism, and sociological individualism—that did not all cohere in one genre. How to assess, for instance, the counterintuitive claim made by Catherine Gallagher, a sophisticated critic, that “the novel discovered fiction”?45 Plausible stories are deemed to be “the real test for the progress of fictional sophistication in a culture,” and all prenovelistic prose forms, including “romances, fables, allegories, fairy stories, [and] narrative poems,” are proclaimed as “fictional” only retroactively and anachronistically, especially as “they were not so described at the time or grouped together under any single category.”46 The novel genre is portrayed as a somewhat timid inventor of its own specialness, discovering and also concealing fiction at once. Considered the most sophisticated version of fiction because it strenuously denies its own fictionality, the novel “opens the conceptual space of fictionality in the process of seeming [?] to narrow its practice.”47 Witness Gallagher’s special pleading: the nonreferentiality of the novel is bolstered by a greater referentiality (because couched within a realist claim about the “species” rather than the “individual,” as Fielding famously argued), while the self-conscious nonreferentiality of all other fictional genres is dismissed as failed self-explanation. The novel’s imposture as history or biography is welcomed as a sign of theoretical coherence, whereas the confident fabulism of other genres that also refer indirectly is dismissed. Despite the emphasis on fiction itself as a newly invented category, Gallagher needs boilerplate for backup: the middle-class English audience of the eighteenth-century novel, “as practical and materialistic readers, . . . rejected fantasy for probability and preferred the familiar to the exotic.” As the fi rst capitalist nation, England propagated realist fiction because of the flexible mental states that are the sine qua non of modern subjectivity involving courtship, commerce, and paper money.48

20

introduction

The self-induced susceptibility created by the novel’s open-ended provisionality apparently permitted more intense engagement with “fiction,” but other genres are not granted the same privilege.49 As Moretti acknowledges, “All great theories of the novel have precisely reduced the novel to one basic form only (realism, the dialogic, romance, meta-novels . . .); and if the reduction has given them their elegance and power, it has also erased nine-tenths of literary history. Too much.”50 The dogmatic approach of the various defenders of novelistic realism from Watt to McKeon to Gallagher can be extrapolated in relation to oriental tales. According to this conventional wisdom, there are contrasting attributes implicitly separating novels and oriental tales: Novels Make Readers into addicts of reality love home keep company with fellow citizens moral/immoral reason like adults responsible experience an “open” genre treat characters as fetishes into national narcissists autoaffective

Oriental Tales Make Readers into addicts of fantasy love travel keep company with strangers amoral/immoral imagine like children escapist experience a “closed” genre treat characters as vehicles into transcultural exoticists heteroaffective

This kind of generic differentiation is nothing more than the proverbial shell game, given that the novel and the oriental tale were trolling for the same readers, who consumed products in both genres with equal satisfaction. Readers could switch back and forth over an array of generic instantiations involving prose fiction: adventure tales, travel narratives, pseudobiographies, real and pretended histories, journalistic exposés, scandal chronicles, conduct manuals, moral tales, and political utopias. In contrast, the retroactive view from the vantage point of the nineteenth century singles out the novel’s domestic origins and ignores the great success of the oriental tale and other sister genres. The domestic novel was placed in the ascendant, not necessarily because of any inherent formal virtues but to favor national parochialism. By the mid-twentieth century, as Mary Helen McMurran argues, Ian Watt substituted new obsessions around the rise of modernity for older obsessions around the origins and transmission of fiction. While fiction’s extranationality was key to the early novel’s emergence, historical narratives of the origins of fiction (such

Enlightenment Orientalism

21

as Abbé Huet’s and Clara Reeve’s) gave way to universalist theories of fiction that seek the pragmatics of sociological grounding over speculations concerning cultural borrowing. McMurran demonstrates that even while translation swiftly gets relegated to secondary status as a modern adjunct to vernacularity, “the modernity thesis helps retail the novel as a universal brand.” The novel’s spread increasingly becomes a franchise operation for endless replication and celebration. Having expunged the Eastern theory of the origin of fiction as inconsequential, modernity theory can now revel in a Western diffusionism.51 East and West here are less geographical than ideological categories, but that is no great discovery at this point in world history. Meanwhile, the oriental tale had lost use value and cultural status, even though several of its underground classics, such as The Arabian Nights, were never surpassed in popularity by any novel. The disciplinary normativism of the novel, as Clifford Siskin points out, succeeded in shaking the interest in the exotic through institutional preference and nationalist propaganda, leading to a persistent ideology of “novelism” that continues unabated until today.52 While novel and oriental tale had both incorporated the domestic alongside the foreign, the status of the foreign plummeted as the status of the domestic skyrocketed. Once an interest in foreignness could be blamed for lacking all the criteria laid out in the left column above, the criteria of the right column served to undergird negative moral judgments with which to berate readers of oriental tales. However, what if a theory of realism were founded on the pursuit of dissimilitudes rather than the recognition of sameness? Something must have indeed occurred within eighteenth-century literary culture, and it is not my intention to accuse previous critics of bad faith even if they turn out to have been unwittingly partisan in these genre wars, symptomatically expressing the burgeoning national realism of that midcentury moment. One rationalization of what might have actually occurred following such resistance to cultural foreignness and genre variety is suggested by Robert Miles, who sees a parallel development of pre-Romantic subjectivity in the second half of the eighteenth century that internalizes the dynamics of stranger intimacy. Edward Young in Conjectures on Original Composition counsels anyone seeking genius, “Contract full intimacy with the Stranger within thee; excite, and cherish every spark of Intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull, dark mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a body, let thy Genius rise (if a Genius thou hast) as the sun from Chaos; and if I should then say, like an Indian,

22

introduction

worship it.”53 The aesthete shuts out the disruption that could be caused by interaction with other individuals and, exchanging Charles Taylor’s description of a “porous” self for a “buffered” self, perhaps erects the defense mechanisms of national and cultural identity that prevented the possibility of “turning Turk” that threatened European identity during the early modern period.54 All the same, it may not be too fanciful to see Aladdin’s lamp behind Young’s homegrown image of inspiration lying “smothered under negligence” and scattered through a “dull, dark mass,” but that results in the appearance of a body (even if Aladdin’s genie is commanded, not worshiped, Indian-style). If so, a nice irony indeed: even Young’s inner genius cannot be materialized without covert reference to an Oriental genie (see fig. 0.1). As we will see, the fi rst two chapters of the book discuss the pseudoethnographies inspired by Marana and Montesquieu that relied exclusively on the theme of the external foreigner delivering home truths to selves that were still porous enough to accept unfamiliar criticisms from embodied externalities. Genres shifted in response to epistemological ruptures twinned with political uncertainties. Ultimately at stake in the repudiation of the external strangers and the oriental tales they inspired, as Luiz Costa Lima has pointed out in a brilliant but ignored book, was how British nationalist (followed by European) aesthetic ideology began to exercise an unshakable control over the imagination.55 By absorbing readers into an arduous reading time, the novel’s unfi nalizability ultimately drove out (or absorbed) all other prose fictional genres. Costa Lima demonstrates that the debates around the novel genre were anchored in larger questions around the power of the imagination. Though the status of the imagination rose throughout the eighteenth century, it began to be carefully controlled. The theorists of the imagination from one Samuel to another—Johnson to Coleridge—endorsed the primary imagination as involved in eternal acts of creation even as they scapegoated the secondary imagination as generating superfluous forms of fancy. Aristotelian theories concerning the unreliability of phantasmata were adapted to the new situation, where one form of imagination (realist and nationally responsible) could stand for intelligence or cognition even as another form (fantastic and culturally unfi xed) could be associated with error and falsity.56 This quintessentially English form of gatekeeping fi nally spread to Continental theorists as well, with Friedrich Schlegel declaring for Tristram Shandy and against the arabesque, even though it can be documented that Sterne’s metafictional techniques from embedment to interruption were learned from the popularization of the Nights.57 The solipsistic selfreferentiality of the novel drove everything else to the margins.

Enlightenment Orientalism

23

Figure 0.1. The genie Aladdin. From the 1730 edition of Les mille et une nuits: contes arabes. Traduits en François par Mr. Galland (The Hague: Pierre Husson, 1730). Image reproduced with permission from the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.

Yet as Costa Lima points out, the mind control exercised was delicate, involving indirect disapproval rather than direct censorship. While mimetic data were increasingly valorized, disciplinary control reduced the multiplicity of fictional languages within the novel while claiming to enhance it—actually narrowing its practice rather than “seeming to narrow” it, as Gallagher claims. By subordinating novelistic activity to logical affi rmations around credibility and verisimilitude, a process of certification ensued to educate readers’ taste. Novelistic fiction contracted itself considerably from a large canvas to the small-bore world of national realism.

24

introduction

As Georg Lukács famously argued, this was the novel’s tragic fall from the world of epic to bourgeois biography, but we might also call it an intentional move of genre monopoly by its promoters, cornering the market and extirpating rivals.58 This famous search for the middle already places the novel “as an exact mediocrity between a vicious elevation and rampant baseness,” allowing for a discourse of “honest folk” that separate the “most extravagant” from “the common people,” as Madeleine de Scudéry professes in the preface to her heroic Eastern romance Ibrahim (1641).59 The moralists were candid about the nature of this problem of middleness as it confronted them while separating novel from romance. For instance, John Hawkesworth (The Adventurer, November 18, 1754) appears to be less than comfortable with characterizing the novel by domesticated normativity and pseudohistory. According to Hawkesworth, the realist novel’s push toward history gratified curiosity but eschewed catharsis, whereas old epics could violate truth without lessening pleasure. In the wake of a reading of the new realist fictions, “fancy requires new gratifications, and curiosity is still unsatisfied.” If a different genre such as the epic poem “at once gratifies curiosity and moves the passions,” it ends up falling by the wayside because it does not speak of “the fate of a nation.”60 As Nancy Armstrong assesses the performative impact of such observations, “we can consequently think of bourgeois morality as our own distinctive form of magical thinking and the novel as the most effective means of disseminating it.”61 Given these constraints, Costa Lima concludes, “the mechanism of control . . . is a matter of promoting, albeit not in an intentional or conscious manner, an entertaining narrative that, while speaking in a prosaic and familiar way, would be useful, respect truth and religion, favor enterprises benefiting the nation, and maintain history, that is fact, as its horizon.”62 Whither fantastic fiction? Costa Lima describes a process that is almost the polar opposite of Gallagher’s claim that the novel invented fiction: the novel, and the eighteenthand then nineteenth-century English national culture of which it became a propagandistic tool, was predicated on a repudiation of romance and an anchoring in history, and hence “this would equal a veto of the fictional, a veto on which control would build.”63 Rather than inventing fiction, the novel destroyed it. Once this veto of the fictional managed to herd readers, like so many stray cats, into the national realist enclosure, normativity kicked in, using the novel and the newspapers to establish a daily plebiscite on national matters clocked within a single calendrical time. The functionalization of fiction was a resolutely partisan exercise but also

Enlightenment Orientalism

25

led to the devaluation of fantasy, which was driven underground into new genres such as the gothic. To reiterate, novels did not arise organically by a crypto-Darwinian ecology of agentless modernity within which they were a species superior to their less evolved counterparts. Rather, novels were actively promoted into prominence over other forms of fiction that were scapegoated. Rather than sing the praises of a favorite child and heir and its brilliance as dotingly partial parents do, promoters of the novel ought to become curious about other popular genres—so many bastardized and abandoned children—that were denounced by the new pretenders as not meritorious because they did not resemble the favorites. Realist novels usurped the mantle of fictionality as everything else was declared insufficiently or faultily fictional. While some usurpers gain legitimacy by inventing an ancient genealogy (as Fielding famously did by defi ning the novel as “a mock-epic poem in prose”), current promoters of the eighteenth-century novel continue their special pleading with the new methodologies of cognitive science that happily validate Jane Austen’s as the most sophisticated form of narrative. As long as it has the pedigree of the home counties, intelligence can always sally forth into the world.64 Can the complexity and length of epic be forgotten so quickly? In this sense, promoters of the novel are avant-gardist, as they keep talking up the novel’s novelty, uniqueness, and enhanced complexity when compared to rival genres. These are all myths of self-invention that become truths only as their propagators provide selective evidence and willfully ignore the counterevidence. The role assigned to the novel in the eighteenth century needs to be cut down in size, not so much to diminish its demonstrable value (I too love the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century high realist novel—what is not to like?) as to rectify a faulty historical memory fenced by national boundaries that seeks only lookalikes in the past. By legitimating a broader picture of the generic terrain and undoing what Siskin refers to as “the great forgetting,” we could come up with a satisfactory account of the oriental tale that does not have to labor under the charges of immaturity, defectiveness, and obsolescence leveled by partisans of one kind of novel. Why did so many successful eighteenthcentury writers also write oriental tales? There were specific aesthetics that faraway geographies offered, escaping constrained familiarities and ideas. What we need, as Maximillian Novak puts it, “is a history of fictional forms to replace that sub-set, the history of the rise and progress of the novel.”65 Oriental tales are just as important as novels for scholars of national-

26

introduction

ism and the history of the novel, then, because they perform functions of withdrawal, exchange, and porous identification that are as important as the functions performed by realist novels, but are written by their authors and read by their readers with these different objectives in mind. Chronotopes especially are translated through the vehicle of narrative, perhaps in the manner of the memes that sociobiologists have identified as the cultural material that passes across generations. As novelist A. S. Byatt puts it, “Scheherezade’s tales have lived on, like germ cells, in many literatures.”66 It may be useful to turn to a few key prefaces to oriental tales where the theory of fiction was elaborated, to glean alternative views concerning the role that the oriental tale was intended to play by its translators and practitioners. Sieur Du Plaisir’s 1683 appreciation of Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves as a petite histoire that brought in radically new expectations in relation to the earlier turgid historical romances was smuggled into English fictional discourse by Delarivier Manley, who translated it without attribution as the preface to her scandal chronicle / oriental tale attacking Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, titled The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705).67 Du Plaisir sees the petite histoire as taking the place of the historical romance through greater verisimilitude and the recently acquired impatient character of the French, for which Manley silently substitutes “Brisk and Impetuous Humour of the English.”68 The most compelling sentence looking forward to the here and now of the national novel (also echoing Congreve’s famous preface to Incognita) asserts that fiction-writers “ought not to chuse too Ancient Accidents, nor unknown Heroes, which are sought for in a Barbarous Country, and too far distant in Time, for we care little for what was done a Thousand Years ago among the Tartars or Abyssines.”69 Verisimilitude, it is acknowledged, is a form of approximation that does not always achieve accuracy—sometimes truth is not verisimilar, as for instance, when readers hear about Nero’s murder of his mother, as matricide is hardly common; all the same, by their persuasive skills good historians convince their readers of such improbable actions. The tendency toward modernity implies that a sensible reader does not participate in fabulous adventures but focuses instead on “better Characteriz’d” modern heroes who have “Passions, Vertues or Vices which resemble Humanity.”70 Here is evidence of an approach favoring conventional realism, except that this didactic preface, which ends with a recommendation for stories with moral resolutions even if virtue is not always rewarded and vice not always punished, is never picked up or commented upon by any other eighteenth-century

Enlightenment Orientalism

27

fiction writers despite the highly popular bestseller to which it was attached, which went through multiple editions throughout the eighteenth century. Significantly, the allegorical language of Queen Zarah amused both realist and fabulous expectations, and the preface appears to have posed no obstacle. To take another instance, the preface to Pétis de la Croix’s Turkish Tales (1708) places the stories within the speculum principis genre, a very popular one for oriental tales aimed at the moral reformation of the prince and vicariously the commoner as well, making a bid for moral realism while claiming to be more entertaining and instructive than homegrown fairy tales. The fabulistic structure for a royal education had been greatly popularized through Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (1699) and Joseph Harris’s Fables of Pilpay (1699), which had brought Visnu Sarma’s Pañcatantra from India to Europe via Persia and then Arabia. According to Pétis’ translator, these fabulistic tales from Turkey “are not to be consider’d as a confus’d Heap of extraordinary Events jumbled together without any Design or Judgment, but the deliberate Work of one whose principal Aim was to render Virtue amiable, and Vice odious. ‘Tis true, he sometimes gives way to the Impetuosity of his own Imaginations, but never forgets to return to his main Design. In a Word, these Tales are equally instructive, tho’ not so insipid as those of Pilpay; and have all the Beauties, without the Extravagance of our own Tales of the Fairies.”71 Improbability is not to be considered a defect of fiction, according to Samuel Humphreys, who translated Thomas Gueullette, the prolific author of Turkish Tales, Persian Tales, Tartarian Tales, Chinese Tales, Mogul Tales, and Peruvian Tales. Improbable fictions can be good for building national character and patriotism, and indeed there is a biological need for fantastic fiction: “several learned Men, who have been well acquainted with the Structure of an human Body, have recommended, as a salutary Amusement to a Reader, such Pieces as entertain the Imagination with agreeable and surprising Ideas.” Citing Bacon, Humphreys recommends the mental pleasure given by oriental tales that would “give the Spirits a sprightly Flow thro’ the animal Œconomy; by which Means the vital Functions are preserved from the Languors and Interruptions they receive from disagreeable Perceptions, or immoderate Attentiveness, to more elaborate Researches.”72 This gives a humoral and moral twist to the age-old formula dulce et utile even as it looks forward to nationalist arguments for fiction: fantasy is good for the circulation, while the elaborate researches of realist fiction induce a yawn! The title page of Mogul Tales advertises that it is published “With

28

introduction

A Preferatory Discourse on the Usefulness of Romances.” In this essay, the translator defends the romance against criticism that it corrupts the morals, arguing that young people who get into trouble are not naturally drawn to reading and that inculcating reading as a habit would encourage reflection and moral discrimination, including learning to argue, narrate, and engage in polite conversation and social exchange. Readers would eventually graduate from the light reading of fiction to the more solid reading of history, philosophy, and religion: “by turning over such Volumes, Rusticity is quickly polished, and the Beauties of a gentile Behaviour set in such a Light, as must attract a Heart not entirely Savage.”73 Romances “can perform a Metamorphosis, as surprizing as any Ovid, that is, Change a Boor into a Gentleman.”74 The translator suggests that “the late Humour of reading Oriental Romances . . . has . . . extended our Notions, and made the Customs of the East much more familiar to us than they were before.”75 These prefaces to oriental tales can be analyzed alongside Abbé Huet’s and Clara Reeve’s theoretical treatises on the origin of fiction discussed in chapter 1. These prefaces, just like those appended to canonical eighteenth-century fictions later deemed novels and not romances, suggest that a history of fiction since classical times is better off acknowledging the long history of idealism (and anti-idealism) throughout its development, rather than assuming some inexorable march from romance falsity to realist purity. It was, in fact, the interiorization of idealism by Richardson and Rousseau that continued the trajectory of the ancient Greek novel into modernity, a feature even more relevant than these novels’ supposedly heightened realism. The breakdown of objective higher realism into personal impressions and scattershot subjectivism was the abandonment of objective reality for the distortions of individual perspective. This became an immediate target for skeptics of the Richardsonian move, such as Fielding.76 Therefore, to separate novels as realist fictions of the mainline from oriental tales and romances, set aside as deficient precursors or accidental subgenres, ignores how prose fictional genres responded in different ways to questions raised at the same time about the value of fictional and nonfictional narrative. Writers, readers, and translators keep interrogating the relative advantages of utility and pleasure, moral education and amoral distraction, the estrangement of the familiar, and the domestication of the faraway. Apologias for particular forms accompany criticism of others. Dueling through prefatory discourses, disciplinary interventions organize perceptions of relevance that argue for particular taxonomies and genealogies over others.

Enlightenment Orientalism

29

Most of the chapters in this book are constructed to proceed thematically through time, favoring multiple walk-throughs from the earlier to the later part of the century. Each chapter focuses on a mode of Enlightenment Orientalism and works its way through selected examples of that mode to gain critical insights. The next two chapters work through the many different outcomes of Enlightenment pseudoethnography, one of which takes us from Giovanni-Paolo Marana’s initiation of spy fiction through Galland’s Mille et une nuits / Arabian Nights’ Entertainments to Aphra Behn’s and Daniel Defoe’s continuations of that genre. The second chapter gets us from Montesquieu’s canonical classic Lettres persanes / The Persian Letters through to Oliver Goldsmith’s and Elizabeth Hamilton’s deployments of the model Montesquieu learned from Marana. Following this deployment of the critic as embodied externality that still makes possible interactions with a buffered self, the second half of the book discusses the proliferation of oriental tales as transcultural allegories. The third chapter analyzes the close ties between scientific universalism, animal fables, and Enlightenment Orientalism, reading from Fontenelle through to Swift and Voltaire via translations of the multilingual locus classicus of beastfable, Kalila wa dimna. The fourth chapter demonstrates the sexualization of Enlightenment Orientalism through discourses of libertinism and reification from Prévost to Crébillon to Diderot and the it-narratives that followed from commercial advancement. The fi fth chapter analyzes some instances of the productive mode of transcultural allegory within Enlightenment Orientalism, including the famous scandal chronicles of Delarivier Manley and the lesser-known gambits at satirical fictions by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, and Tobias Smollett. A short conclusion vaults across the intervening century to Walter Benjamin and James Joyce as critical vantage points from which we can see the oriental tale as the return of the repressed. Why haven’t all these immensely fertile fictional modes, sitting halfway between the national and the transcultural, between the novel and the fable, been adequately analyzed as part of a larger structure of comparative interchange by literary histories until now? How could the renewed recognition of these historical genres, even as they rise and fall with readerly tastes and authorial inspiration, help us understand the wider application and reach of Enlightenment Orientalism? What are the individual texts we should highlight in order to track the subtle and complex way in which transcultural reading came about then and can happen now? These questions will be addressed in the succeeding pages through close attention to the fictional narratives that qualify as Enlightenment Orientalism.

30

introduction

While each of these texts when considered separately might appear to be a singularity or even an anomaly, they create a compelling pattern when put together as a constellation of differing stellar magnitudes. The goal here is not to displace one form of parochialism for another, or to invert the hierarchy and install the foreign-born fiction over the domestic novel, as that would be perverse and also unpersuasive. If students of the period returned to studying the history and theory of prose fiction in its broadest sense rather than just focusing on the overblown story of the rise of the novel, that would be great progress indeed.

Pa r t 1

Pseudoethnographies

ch apter one

Fiction/Translation/Transculturation: Marana, Behn, Galland, Defoe

A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan]—and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, although still relative, unity—the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, “correct language.” . . . Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization. —Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1981) As a country became civilized, their [sic] narrations were methodized, and moderated to probability. —Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785)

C

lara Reeve’s tract on the novel-romance distinction suggests that cultural progress improves narrative techniques; civilization normalizes expectations and prioritizes realism. If reality is understood as repeating itself, narratives also begin to favor predictable characters. While Reeve’s admission naturalizes realism, Mikhail Bakhtin does not assume what needs to be proved, asking whether a unitary language of national realism is “not something given but . . . always in essence posited.” If nations arose as cultural formations through powerful discourses and practices, the fictions of Enlightenment Orientalism remained a weak counterforce outside the stabilizing forces hinted at by Reeve and Bakhtin. Lateral networks of 33

34

chapter one

fiction existed beyond political boundaries. In fact, given the wide circulation of ancient and medieval fiction, it is puzzling that so many literary historians approach the emergence of the modern novel within an exclusionary national paradigm.1 Bakhtin’s writings document a history of Western prosaics that has bedeviled the last half-century of novel theory. Despite warnings to the contrary by the most acute of his readers, Bakhtin has been popularized as an unqualified celebrator of the novel’s “rise,” and his literary archaeology of prose genres has been read as an unabashed teleology of progress resulting in the apotheosis of the novel as a particularly versatile inheritor of all that went before. It is therefore worth recalling that novel is the name Bakhtin gives to “whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, and the artificial constraints of that system.”2 In other words, a term such as novel is useful only insofar as it puts a static hierarchy of genres into a dynamic and transformative interrelationship. Bakhtin’s ambivalent identifications of carnival, laughter, and generalized irreverence recognize the prophylactic power of ritual, the interplay between a unitary discourse of “sociopolitical and cultural centralization,” and the heteroglossia that this unity dominates. Why is it then that historians of the English novel gleefully use Bakhtin to document those aspects of the incipient novel that are polyglot and transgeneric in their subversion of epic, romance, and poetic modes but become suddenly partisan and forgetful when the usurper is installed on the throne in full regalia and declared the legitimate heir? If Bakhtin’s admonitions were to be carried through to their logical conclusion, novel might denote those genres that are excluded by artificial constraints but continue their subversive productivity. By excluding also-rans in favor of the winner, the institution of the novel legitimizes itself at the expense of the principle of generic transgression, which elevated the novel in the fi rst place. Revisionist histories of autochthonous creation, whether of the English novel or of Romanticism’s emphasis on originality, are modern reflexes, whereas epic often circulated stories of bastardy and usurpation. Rather than restrict the signification of novel, we might silently imagine that, to make sense, such a term needs to include and also contend with the narrative genres of Enlightenment Orientalism that this book explores. 3 In contrast to celebratory accounts of the English novel, I propose that various fictions, including oriental tales and surveillance chronicles, are provisional instances of the translational and transcultural aspects of the multitudinous outside, excluded by acts of enclosure around the novel.4 Against the protocols of a national realism that renders the domestic novel

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

35

as central, the oriental tale and its sister genres, such as the surveillance chronicle, paradoxically indicate (but do not fully exhaust) heteroglossia and unfi nalizability.5 In particular, the surveillance chronicle (commonly known as spy fiction) performs the broader functions of pseudoethnography, while the Arabian Nights story collection translated by Antoine Galland from Arabic into French exemplifies the universality of narrative alongside the titillating effects produced by cultural exoticism. With accompanying tropes of satirical detachment, pseudoethnographic perspectivalism, and alienated self-reflexivity, these fictions intimate several of the structural traits of Enlightenment Orientalism.

REALISM/BEYOND/NATION Bakhtin’s idea of the “chronotope,” borrowed from biology, helps us realize how particular genres, considered ex post facto, enable but also constrain experience. The interrelation of space-time in the chronotope saturates the novelistic event. As Bakhtin explains, the chronotope “provides the ground essential for the showing-forth, the representability of events.”6 By this measure, a geography of novelization—or indeed fictionalization— appears very different from a history of a specific national genre deemed the novel. Much has been said regarding the anachronistic naming of early English fiction as “the novel” even though several practitioners, including Behn, Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, produced polemics against various versions of “romance,” claiming to write “true histories,” “adventures,” “fortunes and misfortunes,” “lives,” “comic-epic poems in prose,” and “a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in different attitudes, for the purpose of an uniform plan.”7 It is also relevant that the term novel, used in the sense of a fiction dealing with familiar and realistic everyday events, in contrast to romance as distant, idealized, and fantastical, was fi rst used by William Congreve in his preface to Incognita in 1692, but rarely repeated until Clara Reeve latched on to roughly the same defi nition almost a century later, in 1785. The term novel was also used sporadically to signal the Italian novella and also the French nouvelle or petite histoire—short stories rather than full-length novels. The tautology of “the” English novel as celebrated by recent critics must be dismantled. John Richetti’s commonsense defi nition makes the novel out to be “a long prose narrative about largely fictional if usually realistic characters and plausible events.” Note the hedging and balancing—“largely fictional . . . usually realistic.” “Plausible”

36

chapter one

adds ballast to the side of realism, just in case a dose of the fictional equal to that of the realist was about to take readers off to the heady lands of Cockaigne. J. Paul Hunter calls the English novel “the story of a presentday individual in a recognizable social and cultural context.” Recognizable to whom? And why should it be wedded to the singular subgenre of (pseudo)biography, when Bakhtin combines biography and autobiography as just one of at least eight types of novel? And even if those problems were resolved (in an unsatisfactorily conservative fashion) as nationally, linguistically, sociologically, and culturally overdetermined, do all novels then fall from grace and become romances as times change and the recognizability of contexts vanishes?8 Autobiography and biography form one of three types within Bakhtinian “Novels Without Emergence,” the other two being “the travel novel” and “the novel of ordeal.” There are five more types listed as “Novels of Emergence,” including “the idyllic-cyclical chronotope,” the bildungsroman, “didactic-pedagogical novels,” “novels of historic emergence,” and an unnamed type that includes David Copperfield and Tom Jones as examples. It has also been pointed out, time and again, that the novel/romance distinction is much harder to make in terms of any major European national tradition other than the English: le roman, der Roman, and il romanzo designated continuously from the past to the present in French, German, and Italian what in English is termed “the novel,” and hence implicitly “not-the-romance.” Evaluating these other non-English traditions, one can still document generic change in terms of divergent continuities, rather than the sharp discontinuities that English novel–promoters are wont to make in order to justify the shift toward the parochial descriptive realism of the English novel as opposed to the most full-blown and antirealist romances.9 It is just as revealing that about 36 percent of novels read in Britain between 1660 and 1770 were translations of French fictions. While this fact has been taken to suggest that the novel was a FrancoBritish affair rather than an exclusively English one, earlier Renaissance English fiction included major influences from Spanish and Italian sources, not to mention the internal dialogue with ancient Greek and Roman fiction and Near Eastern sources. It would be much better for investigations into the history of the novel to operate under the premise that fictions seem largely indifferent to the question of national origin until the mid-eighteenth century.10 The fi rst full-fledged European treatise on the history of prose fiction, Traité de l’origine des romans, by the bishop of Avranches, Abbé PierreDaniel Huet, serves as a transcultural reminder that later Anglocentric

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

37

teleologies tend to forget. Huet’s defi nitive treatise allows a reintegration of national realism and Enlightenment Orientalism. Appended to Madame de Lafayette’s fiction Zayde, in 1670, the treatise was subject to polemic attack by various critics for its xenotropisms. A lot depends on how one translates Huet’s central term Roman (always capitalized in his text). Those who argue that the novel was not yet fully invented until the 1740s would prefer to call his subject romance, whereas Margaret Doody prefers to translate Huet’s references to le roman as “the novel,” especially as the term in French never underwent the shift that the English tradition has decreed retroactively. Huet’s wide and lateral geography of the genre imposes a solution for the origin of fiction that could very well be characterized as an anatopism (or a spatial displacement) compared to the more frequent anachronism involved in the backward projections and false expectations of novel criticism. “The fi rst beginnings of this pleasant amusement of idle innocents [des honestes paresseux],” according to Huet, “have to be found in faraway countries and in remote Antiquity.”11 Huet’s formulations provide a refreshing alternative—that of Enlightenment Orientalism— to the nationalist paradigm for novel criticism. Huet’s defi nition of romances makes them out to be “fictions of amorous exploits written in Prose with artistry, for the pleasure and edification of their readers” (4). He teeters between the descriptive and the prescriptive, adding that if it is not clear whether these works are about love or in prose, they certainly ought to be amatory and prosaic (5). Huet distinguishes fictions from true histories (histoires véritables), but this distinction is more of degree than of kind, with histories being “largely true and only partly false, whereas, on the contrary, romances are true in some parts but false on the whole” (8). Just as the difference between romans and histoires is relative, the distinctions between prose and poetry reveal defi nitional moves made later between novel and romance: Petronius says that poems signify through indirection, by divine intervention, and by free and strong expressions, so much so that they are mostly taken to be Oracles that come forth full of fury rather than as an exact and faithful narration; Romances are simpler, less elevated, less figurative in their invention and expression. Poems have more of the marvelous, and contain as well the verisimilar; Romances have more of the verisimilar, even though they also have sometimes [elements of] the marvelous. Poems are more rule-bound, and more constrained in their ordering, and contain less subject matter, events, and episodes; Romances contain more, because being less elevated and

38

chapter one

figurative, they affect the mind less, and give it room to load up with a much larger number of different ideas. (7)

By foreshadowing the novel-romance debates and anchoring them in verse-prose differences, Huet follows Aristotle, who argued that tragedy’s plausibility was increased if it was based on historical accounts of the fall of the high and mighty, though this feature was not obligatory. So too romances are more credible (“la fiction totale de l’argument est plus reçevable”) when their characters are of middling status (“de mediocre fortune”), as in the romans comiques, rather than when they tell of princes and conquerors who carry out distinguished and memorable exploits (9–10). For Huet, the exploits of the great do not pass muster in these narratives because readers wonder why these actions had been hidden from the historical record thus far. The lives of the less important appear verisimilar even if outside the literary mainstream. Of course, eighteenth-century Britons were not the fi rst to document everyday realities; Huet (and Bakhtin later) sees this impetus expressed very early in Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. Fables, on the other hand, are described as entirely without verisimilitude, along with allegories and parables. These earlier fictional forms are identified with a raft of peoples who are responsible for the non-European origins of fiction—the Egyptians, the Arabs, the Persians, the Medes, the Syrians, and others. Huet’s treatise is speculative and progressive. Finding their world to be teeming with many forms of pleasurable lying, the Greeks and the Romans improved on the materials they were given. Sometimes history degenerated into fiction for want of evidence. Huet affirms a world composed of multiple forms of fiction that are universally desired, arrived at through fairly different routes. In one of the most evocative passages of the treatise, he argues that mimetic fictions are needed whether in poverty or plenty: As when in need, we feed our bodies with roots and herbs when we lack bread; just so, when the knowledge of truth, which is the natural and proper food of the human mind, is lacking, we feed it with lies, which are imitations of truth. And as in plenty, to sate our appetites, we often forgo bread and everyday meats and search for ragouts; so even when our minds know truth, they leave study and contemplation in order to be entertained by the picture of truth, which is lies, because the picture and the imitation are, according to Aristotle, often more satisfying than the truth itself. (80–81)

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

39

According to Huet, the mind has a natural desire for fiction (Aristotelian phantasmata) as well as for new knowledge. Stories do their work through the moral psychology of the reader. While some naive readers are taken in by the shell of the narration, the sophisticated who penetrate beyond the surface can still savor the pleasure of the fictional framework (86). Ultimately, Huet commends romances as “silent teachers [precepteurs muets] who continue the work of schoolteachers; they instruct us to speak and live in a much more practical and persuasive manner than the schoolteachers did; and in the manner of Horace’s view of Homer’s Iliad, that taught morality better and more solidly than the best Philosophers were able to” (96). Turning to Madame de Lafayette’s Zayde, which preceded the treatise, Huet concludes that posterity will not know whether this work was “a History or a Romance” (99). Huet’s teleology may indeed lead to bourgeois realism, but he is also amply aware of the lateral connections that fiction can make to other spaces and places. From this consideration of Huet’s early speculative essay, we learn that the study of modern fictions could (and maybe always should) involve the consideration of narrative interchange among a variety of people, sources, languages, and epochs; that cultural geography can be just as effective as vertical national history; and that realism, truth, verisimilitude, mimesis, history, and various other referential terms are put into play relationally among various literary genres to favor prose over poetry and fiction over fable. By keeping these pointers in mind, students of fictional genres who embark on the materials of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century are less likely to make the errors of selection, omission, and validation that are absolutely necessary to create a national(ist) canon in realist fiction, a project that has as its single-minded objective the consolidation of citizen-subjects in full narcissistic contemplation of their own idealized images. Eschewing the dead end of such intransitivity, the history of fiction can return to the transitive multiplicity of the generic protocols involved in the fictional work of reading. A fuller awareness of Renaissance prose fiction in English, including William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1566–67), John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1579), and Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia (1590), could demonstrate the English high tradition’s involvement with xenotropisms of various sorts. Further, there were several popular pamphlet genres, including the early native rogue tradition, the picaresque, and the criminal biography, all of which interspersed the domestic with the foreign and the realist with the fanciful. All the same,

40

chapter one

theorizing prose fiction was not much of a priority for the writers and readers of these Elizabethan genres, and the genre defi nitions insisted upon by anxious authors who wrote realist eighteenth-century English fictions eventually paid off with institutional recognition by Anglocentric literary history—a product as much of disciplinary formations as that of the personal predilections of individual scholars.12 Fiction is certainly about new ways of discovering “truth” through “the image of truth,” as Huet acknowledges. In parallel, the crucial elements of transport, transformation, and translation cannot be underemphasized if we are looking for evidence of Enlightenment Orientalism rather than just evidence for precursors of national realism. The classical mode of the translatio documents the way cultural transmission followed political and military lines—hence, according to Huet, Spaniards learned l’art de romaniser from the Arabs, and the translatio studii followed the translatio imperii. The genre of the surveillance chronicle is important in the period from 1684 to 1724, with its tropes of exploration, speculation, and circumspection—strongly signaling Enlightenment Orientalism. Elizabethan prose genres were systematically involved in structures of espionage and counterespionage, making for standard themes of treachery, code breaking, infi ltration, confidentiality, surveillance, letter writing, and physical mobility. Consideration of a text such as John Lyly’s Euphues (1579; sequel 1580) should make us realize the flamboyant morphing of genres involved in the exercise. If we consider the two volumes of Euphues, as R. W. Maslen points out, “the fi rst begins as an Italianate novel and ends as a series of letters, becoming an educational treatise and a theological dispute along the way; the second shifts from novel to fable to patriotic eulogy, and closes as a marriage guidance pamphlet.”13 In the next section, I explore the surveillance chronicle as a resilient pan-European translatio in the work of a Genoese refugee to the court of Louis XIV, Giovanni Paolo Marana. Titled L’espion turc in French, or The Turkish Spy in English, Marana’s work (and its continuations) had a major impact in both France and Britain during this period and could be considered one of the foundational texts of Enlightenment Orientalism, and also the generic distillation of what Michel Foucault called one of the greatest tropes of the eighteenth century, “the foreign spectator in the unknown country.”14 In the following sections I evaluate Marana as contextually determinative for an understanding of canonical works by two early novelists better known as precursors of national realism—who also explored Enlightenment Orientalism, wrote in English, and worked as governmental spies—Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe. Galland’s translation of The Ara-

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

41

bian Nights also enters the fictional landscape at this time, creating generalized defamiliarization and a taste for the exotic and the fabulous. As spies traffic with uncertain information in foreign lands to further the objectives of their state sponsors and escape apprehension by singular cultural logics, novels written in English or French with foreign content become members of a proprietary national class only retroactively.

SPYING/ALIENATING/(DIS)ORIENTING The adventure novel of everyday life goes back to the classical period, when in the case of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Lucius can spy on people’s private affairs because he has been converted into an animal whose big ears facilitate eavesdropping. If eavesdropping and voyeurism are age-old tropes for spying, privacy is confused with subversion and conspiracy. The rise of diplomatic networks, faster communications, commissioned histories, and efficient commerce resulted in state-sponsored recruitments of informers, spies, and double agents. The use of manuscript journalism, printed gazettes à la main, and early newspapers signaled growing interest in current events and also increased sophistication and skepticism regarding the interpretation of information through the cross-checking and dating of multiple sources. At the same time, these multiple sources allowed for the appreciation of several perspectives, through which readers and agents could realize opposing objectives and share or disagree about similar information, but also recognize their own limitations and biases within a collective universe of references. Skepticism about others could go hand in hand with cultural relativism; other points of view sometimes cut the ground from under one’s own feet and at other times solidified it.15 Spying is one of the chronotopic motifs that saturate British and French fiction, especially since the publication of The Turkish Spy in French in 1684 and then in English in 1687, after which there were numerous attempts at continuations and imitations for at least another century. Marana’s initial Italian 30-letter original L’esploratore turco (1684) had become a French 102-letter multivolume L’espion turc by 1687. The vogue expanded drastically in London, with censorship avoided through designation of the place of publication as “Cologne.” By 1696–97 The Turkish Spy became an eightvolume, 632-letter L’espion dans le tour des princes chrétiens, a sprawling miscellaneous compendium in multiple editions that speculated on “present wars, transactions, and intrigues of Christian courts, states, and kingdoms.”16 Amid these political commentaries, the text also features the protagonist’s “immethodical falling upon philosophical, divine, and moral

42

chapter one

Figure 1.1. Title page to the 1730 edition of The Turkish Spy, by G. P. Marana (London: Printed for G. Strahan et al., 1730). Image courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

contemplations” revealing paranoia and fear of exposure, and indeed perhaps the earlier transcultural counterpoint for Clara Reeve’s concern for national “methodizing” (1:iii). The eponymous Turkish spy is “Mahmut the Arabian,” ironically described as “the vilest of the Grand Signior’s slaves,” who sends letters from Paris to Istanbul during the years 1637 to 1682. Under deep cover, Mahmut goes by the identity Titus the Moldavian

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

43

(with his knowledge of Slavonic serving as a hint of his sympathy for Deism, Socinianism, and Hussitism).17 Half Democritus and half Heraclitus, alternately laughing and weeping, Mahmut is a homely, ordinary personality, “being of low stature, of an ill-favored countenance, ill-shaped and by nature not given to talkativeness” (4:176; 1:1). Over the course of the letter sequence, it comes out that Mahmut has fallen deeply in love with Daria, a Greek matron who heartlessly betrays and exposes his erotic interest in her more than once (1:214–21, 272–76; 7:38–39, 60–63). The letters run a gamut from the satirical to the sentimental, the political to the religious, and the social to the personal; the reader is “assured of an exact history, abounding in considerable events” (1:xxxix). Mahmut’s advice is also to “be conversant in histories”; histories “open the graves, and call forth the dead . . . they introduce us into the closets of princes, revealing their most secret counsels; they make us familiar with the intrigues of politicians” (1:9; 3:119–22). In addition to the focus on history, the work delivers “proper and useful remarks [and] pleasant and agreeable stories” (3:14–15). It is perhaps no surprise that Lenglet du Fresnoy, in his eighteenth-century treatise on the use of novels, characterizes L’espion turc as roman historique.18 The genre of letters as personal advice and psychological counseling is developed here (later to be perfected by Samuel Richardson). The text counsels readers even while hinting that they are privy to hidden ciphers coyly referred to as “Art’s Master-piece.” As Mahmut says, “a letter of an ordinary style, of domestic affairs, of love and compliments, may contain secrets of the greatest importance” (1:80– 81). Decipherment of such information is subject to the vagaries of linguistic equivalence: “it is impossible to screw up the dull phrases of Europe to the significant idioms of Asia” (4: 46). The reciprocal transcoding of political and private fictions is difficult but also possible. Marana was implicated in the Savoy-inspired political conspiracy of Raphael della Torre against the Genoese state and suffered imprisonment for four years. Asked to write a progovernment history of the conspiracy that was later suppressed, Marana fled to France, where he published a revised account.19 The surveillance chronicle genre spanned a veritable flood of texts from the 1680s to the 1710s, including the spy novels of Aphra Behn, François de Fénelon, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. There continues to be a controversy about the authorship of the volumes subsequent to Marana’s fi rst, based on a series of speculations that range from the author being Marana himself to English replacement candidates including Daniel Saltmarsh, William Bradshaw, John Sault, Roger

44

chapter one

Manley (father of surveillance chronicler Delarivier Manley), John Midgley, and an unnamed English Jacobite in exile with James III’s court in St. Germain-en-Laye. Meanwhile, French critics predictably favor the candidacy of a number of Gallic authors, including Bayle, Cotolendi, Marana’s translator François Pidou de St. Olon, and the intriguing possibility of an unidentified French Huguenot refugee intellectual exiled in London after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Even as there is a “continuity of design, characterization, and style” throughout the letters, the spy’s political position also changes from that of a liberal Catholic to that of a rationalist Deist (and hostile reviewers therefore sometimes accused him of atheism). One of the most convincing source studies, by Jean-Pierre Gaudier and Jean-Jacques Heirwegh, describes the matter of the author’s identity as flatly equivalent to that of the text—in other words, “a network of plausibilities” rather than a fi xed biographical identity (see fig. 1.2).20 This critical controversy over authorship reaffirms a delirious transmission and circulation. The putative text is actually a destabilizing web of found manuscripts, translation, and secret information from various elsewheres. The author’s preface discusses the discovered packet of Mahmut’s writings edited and made available to the public—a standard trope in fiction from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century— to reveal authorial fragmentation and the hybridity of multiple sources. A work that began with an Italian-language original morphed into a French project and ended up as a prominent English-language venture (with the likelihood that the later volumes were translated from English back into French). What better model of the multidirectional passage of fiction and Enlightenment Orientalism could ever be discussed? Whether as novel or romance, as satire or epistle, The Turkish Spy made its way across the Continent advertising Ottoman cosmopolitanism. Mahmut translates texts for Cardinal Richelieu and reports to Visier Asem on the purport of these writings (1:140). Mahmut is more than a match for the French churchman’s legendary surveillance techniques, saying, “Though Cardinal Richelieu be an Argus, he is blind as to what concerns me” (1:276). Mixed in with much late seventeenth-century political history are frequent redactions of ancient Assyrian, Persian, and Roman history as well as accounts from Germany, Italy, Africa, and France. The translational frame of the work can be easily recognized as Enlightenment Orientalism: with the retailing of political news, moral reflections, and subjective emotions, The Turkish Spy takes the form of the familiar letter that anticipates the periodical essay and the novelistic interpolation. Frontispieces published with this text (see fig 1.2) emphasize the soli-

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

45

tary and contemplative life of Mahmut, depicted as a scholar at his desk. Present around him are the traveler-scholar’s accessories—manuscripts, maps, a globe, timepieces, and other instruments. Three of the books on his library shelves are singled out with titles: “Al-Coran,” “Tacitus,” and “St. Austin,” perhaps signaling the perspective of the Muslim observer fused with the classical political rhetoric of Tacitus’s observations of the Germans and the confessional aspects of Augustinian interiority. If these attributes make Mahmut into something of a Renaissance humanist, and indeed into the Enlightenment Orientalist par excellence, the bag of gold coins, the lit lamp, his bearded visage, the curtains, and some disarray among his documents also suggest the nocturnal precariousness of the spy. The props of rational humanism are delicately balanced against the instruments of secret correspondence. The portrait of a spy under an assumed identity visualizes self-revelation alongside imposture. Turks who visited cities such as Venice were housed in a special residence, the Fondaco dei Turchi, where they would presumably be under some surveillance. That Mahmut could melt away into the general populace in Paris makes for radical outcomes. Perhaps the discerning reader infers that the spy’s careful cultivation of disinterestedness could also be subjected to a hidden agenda that reverses appearances. The status of the spy’s disinterestedness took off in direct imitations, even as the motif of spying collapsed into that of innocuous voyeurism. Among spinoffs, there are Gatien de Courtilz’s The French Spy (1700), Ned Ward’s The London Spy (1698–1700), Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy (1709), Captain Bland’s The Northern Atalantis, or York Spy (1713), the anonymous The German Spy (1738), The Jewish Spy (1739), Eliza Haywood’s The Invisible Spy (1755), and many more. In the meantime, by 1776 at least twenty-six different editions of The Turkish Spy had been published. It has been argued that Addison and Steele’s Spectator essays are beholden to Marana. The Turkish Spy popularized distanced social and cultural observations about strangers made by an observer who is in disguise or passing through. The spy is a vehicle for satire and ethnographic commentary, as well as a device to distance the author from the opinions of the naive observer. There is always danger inherent in such activities: “he that peeps in at his neighbour’s window may chance to lose his eyes” (3:14–15). Also present in Mahmut’s commentary are the bare beginnings of more innocuous forms of voyeurism, with the detailed touristic descriptions of great cities that would later stimulate a flood of memoirs about the Grand Tour: “Constantinople and Paris are indeed two of the greatest cities in the world” (1:53; 2:199–204; 7:241–48). However, Mahmut

Figure 1.2. Frontispieces to The Turkish Spy, 1730 (left) and 1770 (right) editions. From Marana, The eight volumes of letters writ by a Turkish spy (London: Printed for G. Strahan et al., 1730), and from Marana, Letters written by a Turkish spy (London: A. Wilde, 1770). Images courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

48

chapter one

later expresses “a natural aversion for great and populous cities,” which are “magnificent sepulchres of the living” (6:292). The city, a place of refuge, turns dangerous: “fi rst designed for sanctuaries of the distressed, [cities] should become worse than desarts, and more inhospitable than the purlieus of dragons, or the dreadful haunts of lynxes, crocodiles and other animals of prey” (7:22). Yet at the same time, the observer is inevitably absorbed into the world he observes, and Mahmut agonizingly becomes more French as the volumes proceed: “I am in France, yet cannot call it a foreign country, since innocence and virtue naturalize a man in all parts of the world” (2:146). For theoretical clarity and indeed rational Enlightenment, Mahmut follows Descartes, who recommends that he who wishes to perfect his reason must “shake off the prepossessions and prejudices of his infancy and youth, [and] wipe, brush, or sweep his soul clean of the very dust and relics left behind on our faculties by those fi rst foreign invasions and encroachments on our minds” (1:xvi). In keeping with this martial imagery of the triumph of reason that goes against Mahmut’s duplicitous status as a spy, the objective of the treatise is proclaimed as “building a fortress or stronghold from where attempts of open enemies and sly secret interlopers can be resisted” (1:xviii). At the same time, Descartes is praised for giving women emancipatory potential; the Turks ought to follow suit in liberating their women in the manner of the French. Renaissance rationalism bleeds into Enlightenment Orientalism and anticipates feminism. As ladies apply themselves to the study of philosophy in France, “the pen has almost supplanted the exercise of the needle; and ladies closets, formerly the shops of female baubles, toys, and vanities, are now turned to libraries and sanctuaries of learned books” (2:26). Printing and translation into the vernacular are praised: “the lowest sort of people who can but read, have the privilege to become as knowing as their superiors, and the slave may vie for learning with his sovereign.” At the same time, from “this depraved indulgence of printing . . . what sacrileges, massacres, rebellions and impieties have overflown most parts of the west in this licentious age” (3:120–21). There is another dark underside to this blinding light of reason: Mahmut’s increasing melancholy (2:144–47; 6:74–78, 122; 7:241; 8:1–3). This fear of the loss of identity and its counterpart, the fear of exposure whereby a “true” identity would be revealed, lead to Mahmut’s ultimate disappearance—or perhaps unsolved murder—at the end of the eighth volume. While The Turkish Spy is a prime exhibit for the early expression of Enlightenment values, its complexity also suggests the irrational repercussions and violent rupture that Enlightenment has always been unable to vanquish. A

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

49

similar paradox will be explored in greater depth by Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, to be discussed in the next chapter. In L’espion turc, the reader can be regaled with information about various manners and customs seen from a decentered perspective and hear of Mahmut’s interviews with Cardinal Richelieu (1:137–40, 165–76, 254–55; 2:89–91). Mahmut’s observations range from those on political figures such as Richelieu, Mazarin, or the Queen Mother to speculations on the status of women, advice about state policy, and major interventions in controversies about religious doctrine and their consequences. Mahmut “hope[s] to see in open light the naked form of things,” even though this often takes the form of establishing national stereotypes, especially of the French, the Spanish, the Italians, and the Germans—the raw matter of novelistic national realism (8:44, 75–81). By the last volume, Mahmut develops a very sophisticated notion of impressionistic accuracy that might well be at home with nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates around narrative realism.21 The most celebrated novel of the eighteenth century that uses the ethnographic observer to telling effect is Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), often identified as much indebted to the epistolary genre invented by Marana. The Marana-Montesquieu combination of pseudoethnography alongside satire, critique, and reflection has a longer European genealogy, going back to Baltasar Gracián’s El criticón (1650–53) and other lesserknown texts.22 By the time we get to later examples, such as Charles Dufresny’s Amusemens sérieux et comiques (1734), George Lyttelton’s Persian Letters (1735), Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), the characteristics of the surveillance chronicle have been shed, or so naturalized as to give us a version of the pseudoethnographic novel, as we will see in chapter 2. These peculiar mixtures, where fiction and nonfiction rub up against each other (and the novel), derive from Marana’s and Montesquieu’s innovations. Mahmut’s role allows for a centralized observation through his perspective, with individual letters functioning paratactically; in this regard the epistolary compendium mirrors older story cycles that feature frame narrators and individual stories, producing the “abruptness and obscurity and frequent changes of subjects” that the preface apologizes for (1:iii).23 This idea of “immethodical” observation is part and parcel of the developing form of the essay since Montaigne, the nonfictional genre that constituted itself as the nonfictional rival to the category of prose fiction. Marana can therefore be cited as a common source for the oriental tale and the Spectator papers, for epistolary satire and the periodical essay, for

50

chapter one

prose fiction and social commentary, for fantastical projection and realist ekphrasis—indeed, for Orientalism and Enlightenment.

THE TRANSCULTURAL TEXT: THE ARABIAN NIGHTS As an investigation of the surveillance chronicle and its origins shows, a full sense of Enlightenment Orientalism is impossible without attending to the traffic between France and Britain through literary translation. From the beginnings of print till the middle of the eighteenth century, English literary Orientalism was positioned more as receiver and consumer than as producer, especially as many fictional translations and productions originated in France and made their way over as direct translations (as with Orientalist authors including Antoine Galland, Pétis de la Croix, Montesquieu, the Comte de Caylus, and a host of others). There had been a previous wave of baroque Orientalism that included the long heroic romances of the seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes, Madeleine de Scudéry, and La Calprenède. Cervantes jovially attributed the authorship of Don Quixote to Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian. In this sense, medieval as well as early modern romances were always in conversation with the East. A steady increase of “Eastern” materials from 1680 to 1750 was based on a spike of actual translations of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic manuscripts (and the ethos produced by them, which led to retranslations, multiple imitations, and pretended translations). In addition, there were the accumulated diplomatic correspondence and travel narratives, and the commencement of political histories of the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires, by important French travelers such as François Bernier, Sir John Chardin, Jean de Thévenot, and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. Arguably, the seeds for “corporate” Orientalism had already been sown with Barthélemy D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697), completed by Galland after the former’s decease as a veritable encyclopedic dictionary. One study suggests that more than six hundred full-length books, encompassing historical, political, religious, and fictional genres, were translated into French from Persian, Turkish, and Arabic in the period 1730 to 1750.24 The very term oriental tale is a generic convergence of sorts that took some time to cohere. According to Jean-François Perrin, “the idea to promote Oriental Tales [Contes orientaux] came to [Comte de] Caylus in 1743; his predecessors had preferred the playfulness of generic oscillation among fables, history/stories, tales, adventures, novels [romans], etc., redoubled with diverse ethnic particularizations: Arab, Persian, Tartarian, Chinese,

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

51

Moghul, Indian tales, etc.”25 The founding of a style and a repertoire almost immediately led to multiple instances of parody, pastiche, forgery, and pseudotranslation by writers such as Anthony Hamilton, Claude Crébillon, and Voltaire. The imitations were never simply stylistic attacks but complex reenactments that allowed new statements of the initial themes. Enlightenment of a soft variety was often at stake, even if it did not always take the explicit philosophical apparatus deployed by writers like Voltaire or Montesquieu. Almost always, there were the formalized roles of an editor, a reader, and a translator, who had to make sense of the stories—their strangeness but also their applicability across space and time—while these mediating identities created a sense of textual sourcing, layering, and packaging. The Arabic tradition of Kalila wa dimna, which can be traced back to the Sanskrit sources of The Pañcatantra, also made its way into Europe through multiple cycles of beast fables from the medieval period (discussed in greater detail in chapter 3). There might be no better global example of the transculturation between East and West that constituted Enlightenment Orientalism than the movement from the Arabic Alf layla wa-layla to the French Mille et une nuits to the English Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (see fig. 1.3).26 Since the nineteenth century the fi rst stage of the collection’s literary genesis has occupied generations of scholars as an endless regress. The core story cycle is traced to ninth-century Iraq and before that to Persian and Indian sources lost in the mists of time. Nabia Abbott argues that a ninthcentury paper fragment that includes the title page of a version of the Nights along with the opening dialogue between Dinazad and Shirazad might be the earliest existing piece of a paper book.27 The magical narratives are likely the product of eleventh- and twelfth-century Egypt, with some early seventeenth-century additions. To fully understand the genesis of the Nights, the scholar needs some familiarity with the Levantine languages that its fi rst European translator, Galland, possessed, especially Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. A fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript came from the Levant to Paris because the erudite Galland had traveled extensively to that region in the 1670s and 1680s as secretary to M. de Nointel, ambassador to the Sublime Porte, during which time he had been on a quest for books, manuscripts, coins, and medals. Galland collected the material he later used to complete D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale’s over eight thousand entries. During this massive editorship, Galland also turned his attention to translating Kalila wa Dimna, and he went ahead with a translation of the Sindbad stories (1701), followed by serial installments of the Mille et une nuits translated from the three-

52

chapter one

Figure 1.3. Scheherezade and Schahriar in bed with Dinarzade standing by. Frontispiece to vol. 1 of Les mille et une nuits: contes arabes. Traduits en François par Mr. Galland (The Hague: Pierre Husson, 1714). Image reproduced with permission from the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.

volume Syrian manuscript (1704–17). A Maronite named Hanna Diab (Jean Dippi) travelled from Aleppo to Paris and began furnishing Galland with additional oral forms of the story cycle from 1709 onward.28 The complex cycle of transmission has always been a major focus of scholarship on the Nights.29 The work’s entry into print culture since 1704, fi rst as a French transcreation, constitutes an entry into European

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

53

discourse and featured a kind of mechanical reproduction different from that of manuscript culture. However, we have to be wary of treating this moment as a singular event, given that several of the component stories of Mille et une nuits likely circulated in Europe since the medieval times of al-Andalus, though the frame tale came much later. 30 As Madeleine Dobie suggests, the translational contact zone between Romance-Christian languages and Arabo-Islamic culture is something of a “blind interface,” a continuous centuries-long interaction that left little extant cultural memory. It seems as if the Occident and the Orient kept playing Fort-Da with each other, having known each other for millennia but still always forgetting, disavowing, and rediscovering each other as if wholly new. 31 Huet’s anatopian hypothesis emphasizes this ambivalent gift in full measure, projecting the idea of narrative plenitude on the East. A range of other texts in French and English were engendered by Galland’s intervention, amplifying the oriental tale into a full-blown genre. In his dedication to the Marquise d’O, Galland characterizes the Arabian stories as “narrations . . . fabuleuses à la vérité, mais agréables et divertissantes” (truly fanciful narratives, although pleasing and entertaining). 32 Galland’s low-key characterization matches the aesthetic status of the original: in terms of conventional Arabic literary aesthetics, the Alf layla wa-layla did not continuously participate in the structure of adab or the system of high-cultural values accorded to privileged Arabic poetic genres such as maqa¯ma, muwashshah, and zajal. While there was an Arabization of the story cycle around the tenth century, when it may have been momentarily canonized, thereupon the Alf layla wa-layla fell out of Arab high culture for at least eight centuries. 33 It did continue to flourish through the lowbrow genre called khura¯fa, or prosaic popular literature— transmitted largely through techniques of free oral adaptation. Entering European print culture as a transcreation, the Nights takes its point of discursive departure through the expansion of print capitalism in the early eighteenth century: by 1800 there were already eighty English editions, and in the last two centuries it has exerted an influence on the literatures of the entire world, taking popular culture by storm through cinema and adaptations for children. The uncertain “network of plausibilities” around Marana’s authorship and The Turkish Spy’s textual identity reveal something subtler when applied to the Nights. As Eva Sallis, a trenchant critic of the hitherto unfulfi lled literary analysis of the Nights, states, “the immediate implication of having an identity as literature larger than any of its versions is that no version alone is sufficient for study purposes.”34 Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum point out that we have to think of the

54

chapter one

Nights as an amalgamation of all its editions and translations, making the text “a kind of subtext for much larger, even global, relationships.” Based on a fourteenth- or fi fteenth-century Syrian manuscript, Galland’s Nights already refers to lands as far from the Arab world—and from each other—as Africa, Persia, India, and China. 35 What is the process that led to such unstoppable influence? The story cycle reiterates an internal dialectic between tropes of travel and stasis, strangeness and familiarity.36 Over a textual insistence on astonishment and defamiliarization (akin to that found in medieval and Renaissance European travel narratives), Galland imposes a regime of familiarity and aesthetic propriety, making his characters sound as if they might be in the court of Louis XIV. In the words of Arthur Weitzman, “Galland transformed the highly pungent and sensual medieval Arabic of the original into the sensible and circumspect prose of the early eighteenth century.”37 However, as some have argued, Galland’s objective was not so much literary as anthropological: to use the literature as a way of documenting manners and customs, as he asserts in the preface to the collection, and as he also does with the Bibliothèque orientale, having freely edited, abridged, and rearranged the text, and also organizing explanatory sections, thus transcreating the original. At the same time, none of the generic multiplicity of the original texts—their mixture of bad poetry, oral formulary, and prosaic narration (presentations that are, as André Miquel says, “tonalities rather than literary genres”)38 —is registered by Galland. While Galland emphasizes bienséance and familiarity, subsequent translations, such as those by Richard Burton and J. C. Mardrus / Powys Mather, provide reactive counterpoise in their focus on exoticizing elements and the delirious confusion of genres. 39 Beneath Galland’s seeming homogeneity is a seething mixture of Bakhtinian generic dialogism, revealed much more overtly in the swarm of texts that follows from his translation. Across three hundred years of translation, adaptation, and influence through oral, print, and media culture, the translational and transcultural shuttling of the Nights has led to various local identifications. Readers need to distinguish carefully among the individual versions of this compendium of stories and contend with the multiple languages in which the cycle was disseminated, whether through translations, transcreations, imitations, or allusions. A search for textual origins can lead to a suspiciously linear account of transmission and translation, from the manuscript version of Alf layla wa-layla in Arabic to Galland’s Mille et une nuits in French, to the eighteenth-century Grub Street version of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments in English, and thereon. The Nights was fol-

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

55

lowed almost immediately by Pétis de la Croix’s Thousand and One Days (1710), translated from Turkish sources, and Jean-Paul Bignon’s Les aventures d’Abdalla (1712–1715), leading to the pastiches of Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s Thousand and One Quarters-of-an-Hour: Tartarian Tales (1715), Jacques Cazotte’s Thousand and One Fopperies: Tales to Put You to Sleep (1742), and Chevalier Duclos’s Five Hundred and a Half Mornings (1756) and Syrian Tales (1756), as well as a great number of other spinoffs, including Turkish Tales (1707), Chinese Tales (1723), Mogul Tales (1732), and Tales of the Genii (1764). There are also Anthony Hamilton’s delightful parodies that integrate Greek and Arab myth, such as Le Belier, Histoire de Fleur d’Épine, and Les quatre facardins (all published posthumously in 1730). At each stage of establishing diachronic textual genealogies and documenting imitations, parallels, pastiches, and parodies, there is corruption, innovation, and the possibility of multidirectional lines of fl ight. In addition to genetic investigations of textual borrowing, scholars have to be aware of lateral offshoots, intercultural exchange, and unnoticed elements of expansion. The Nights brought a vogue not just for the thematic elements it introduced, such as the flying carpets, metamorphoses, and exotic adventures we fi nd in some oriental tales, but also for formal elements that led to sophisticated innovations in the novel form and the epistemological content we may now come to recognize as “Enlightened,” including nested narratives, moral interrogations, and metafiction, as witnessed in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. A recent article that discusses these influences puts it accurately in terms of a reprise rather than a singular event: “the Nights’ re-arrival in the West coincided with the Western reemergence of the novel.”40 There was a diffuse presence of parallel literary borrowings. Fables of Bidpai or Pilpay (in Arabic Kalila wa Dimna) was also a major source text alongside the Nights, with Galland himself doing a translation into French that he had begun in 1696 but put aside. Originally derived from the Sanskrit Pañcatantra, Kalila wa Dimna was translated into Castilian in the thirteenth century and subsequently into Latin, French, and English. Along with Aesop (or Lokman), Bidpai had a major influence on homespun moral philosophy. Framing and self-reflexivity, crucial dimensions of the Nights, are, unsurprisingly, important features of the discourse of Enlightenment Orientalism. Frames allow various narrators to take turns and thus mark a shift from the communitarian context of oral storytelling toward a written literature. Turn-taking involving several narrators also characterizes some of the great European story cycles, including The Decameron and The

56

chapter one

Canterbury Tales. Frames can prevaricate and occupy time, deferring an unpleasant outcome such as an execution or a voyage, indirectly producing present surplus out of imminent lack. Such formal features are found in story cycles of Sanskrit origin, including the Persian Tutinama, which traveled to the Mediterranean. When the transactional nature of storytelling is acknowledged—as there is always an implicit contract between teller and listener that is thematized through the structure of embedded stories—the reprieves accorded to Scheherazade and other characters sentenced to death symbolically spill over to suggest multiple cultural locations. Alongside the narrators’ oblique presentation, a witnessing system anchors the stories: recessive frames are put on hold as inset tales unfold through a “Chinese box” structure.41 Ferial Jabouri Ghazoul argues that the Nights text is “free” rather than “fi xed,” creating repetitive “geological” patterns rather than growth-oriented biological ones. Each of its stories features a “matrix,” a principal sentence to which all others are subordinated.42 These dimensions of the Nights have yet to be fully acknowledged by Eurocentric literary historians, who see novelistic techniques as having developed ab ovo rather than through a diffuse process of transculturation and transcreation. Perhaps one of the most provocative hypotheses concerning alternative dimensions of transcultural narrative is put forth in Tzvetan Todorov’s essay “Les hommes-récits,” which resituates the Nights as action fiction.43 Todorov’s examination of the character function in the cycle is beholden to Vladimir Propp’s elaboration of this concept in his classic text Morphology of the Folktale.44 Todorov aims to wrest the Nights away from the depth subjectivity model of fiction normalized in modern European literature by Henry James and others. James’s novels subordinate plot elements to character and thus become means to psychoanalyze the subtle network of motivations, moods, and nuances that map literary meaning.45 This approach to action in fiction is transitive, according to Todorov, because actions are never allowed to stand on their own; they are always anchored in character, where their true meaning is found. In contrast to psychological dissections of the bourgeois novel, Todorov promotes the Nights as a global text that features an action-oriented utopia of literary a-psychologism. Enlightenment Orientalism derives some of its transcendental power from this form of epistemological alienation. Action in the Nights, Todorov argues, becomes intransitive, staying in touch with itself, rather than being hijacked by character. Todorov puts forward a proposal for a “predicative literature,” focused on immediate rather than mediated causality, and the transformation and metamorphosis of the grammatical

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

57

predicate. This makes for a different kind of fiction from that implicated in the stability and reconsolidation of the psychological and grammatical subject.46 Such an approach, which embraces the transformative and alien power of the Nights, could lead to a new history of the novel, given the simultaneous popularity of the Sindbad tales and Robinson Crusoe throughout the eighteenth century—with “subjective” and “predicative” literature coexisting and proceeding on parallel lines. To this we can add the philosophical and moral tonalities of Marana and Montesquieu, who have the tendency to desubjectify even while not being action-oriented or predicative in the Todorovian sense. What might be at stake in reading Marana, Galland, Montesquieu and their imitators is the possibility of a very different theory of fiction from the Whiggish one that has normalized the account of the birth of the national realist novel as integral to the construction of the modern territorially based subject. What if the “predicative” elements of fiction are an alternative to nationalist subjection? The reader of fantastic texts could be conceptualized as an open-ended back-formation from the fiction, especially when such fiction is not retailing distorted mirror images of national selves. Ungrounded in territorial terra fi rma, such a reader is afloat on an ocean of stories that suspends realities, or is even borne aloft on a magic carpet of possibility above and beyond recognizable referents. As background becomes foreground and action transcends character, the reader as construct is subject to principles of desubjectivation. Resonance, connotation, and fluidity dominate over didactic objectives (though didacticism and instrumentalization became significant attributes of the laterera English oriental tale, for reasons that may now be more comprehensible). We may playfully follow Todorov in his search for what we may call a new taleology that irreverently undermines the nation-bound and realist teleology of fiction. A taleology of the oriental tale undermines stageist accounts of the development of fiction as proceeding from naive realism to sophisticated forms and eventually to modernism and postmodernism. Here the Nights, Robinson Crusoe and Tristram Shandy fulfi ll expectations of formal artistry even when violating realist norms. The immediate causality contained in many of the Nights stories reduces the distance between cause and effect and makes psychology appear to be a byproduct of action. The capitalizing logic of the character-subject as nominalization is dissolved in favor of an action-oriented interplay of verbs generating still others in a magical liquidation of characterological capital. Rejecting the Jamesian economy of bourgeois individualism, Todorov presents the Nights as enacting an economy of the gift that dissolves

58

chapter one

characters into actions rather than consolidating actions into character. These are not, however, indications of stable village communities that reconsolidate existing identities but new versions of magical self-dissolution and delightful metamorphosis. In oriental adventure, characters appear, and disappear, to motivate actions that proceed in a self-perpetuating cycle. This thesis inverts the relation between the novel and the folktale as envisaged by Bakhtin, who interpreted adventure time as primitive and anachronistic when compared to modern time. However, we might not want to follow the logic of diachronic genealogy so favored by historians of the novel, and instead seek to account for the simultaneous multiplicity and coexistence of genres across cultural space, including novel and folktale, and with these examples, the various forms of subjective, predicative, and desubjectivated literature.47

FROM SURVEILLANCE CHRONICLE TO SECRET HISTORY Although histories of the eighteenth-century English novel could sometimes pay lip service to Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1604) or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), many courses on the subject often begin with Aphra Behn, and especially her Oroonoko (1688), which features colonial, romance, and antislavery motifs along with the notions of “true history” and “natural Intrigues” opposed to those of “adorn[ment]” or “the Addition of Invention” involving a “feign’d Hero, whose Life and Fortunes Fancy may manage at the Poet’s Pleasure.”48 The novel’s insistence on the authenticity of the events it narrates and the transparency of the title character and the Peeie Indians are combined with a parallel undercurrent of subterfuge, espionage, and political manipulation referencing three continents. The unnamed female narrator observes, narrates, and also steps into the action, bridging the diegetic and nondiegetic worlds and the statuses of author, narrator, and character, generating epistemological and narratological uncertainty. Yet she is the focus of much political hostility and interpersonal slipperiness. Conspiracy and betrayal seem to be integral aspects of the novella—whether in the Ottoman-inflected Coromantien of Oroonoko’s kingdom or the English- and Dutch-settled Surinam of the Americas to which Oroonoko is brought as a slave. Speculation as to whether Behn might have actually visited Surinam has never been fully resolved; evidence strongly suggests, however, that she probably did. She might have traveled as daughter, mistress, husband-hunter, servant, agent, courier, or spy, or perhaps with several of these identities overlapping each other. Behn, who subsequently had a full-blown career as a governmental

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

59

spy for Charles II’s secretary of state, Lord Arlington, as “Agent 160” in Holland in 1666, was fully aware of the multiple protocols of secret and coded communications. Behn’s narrator matches Mahmut in subterfuge as well as pseudoethnography. Correspondingly, the text has been subject to multiple allegorical interpretations that are very suggestive of the techniques of Enlightenment Orientalism.49 Oroonoko stakes a strong claim as a new global and indeed predicative fiction that triangulates Africa, Europe, and America in equal measure— in this respect, it is a work much closer to Huet’s transcultural sweep than to Ian Watt’s national realist teleology.50 A convergence of several continents, races, political regimes, and gender dynamics makes this text a favored origin for a postcolonial eighteenth century and a symptomatic critical investment in it, which I have discussed and critiqued elsewhere.51 In many ways, the assumed secrecy of the narrator and the surveillance to which Oroonoko and other characters are subjected, whether in Surinam or Coromantien, thematically unite the disparate parts of the text. The chronotope of the spy carries over as the appropriate organizing principle of a fiction of global relevance with various paratactical elements. Marana’s text was translated and published in England by 1687, a year before Behn published Oroonoko. Turkish themes were not entirely foreign to Behn, whether in her plays or in shorter fictions such as The Dumb Virgin (1700).52 Charles II’s extensive “harem” of mistresses was recognized during the Restoration as loosely resembling Turkish practices. For instance, in The Turkish Spy, Mahmut compliments Charles II’s “concubines . . . most of them nobly extracted” as he empathizes with this prince’s being “harassed at home by domestic sedition, factions, plots, and conspiracies of his own subjects” (8:144). Mahmut equates Charles’s position with that of a Turkish sultan, even as he refers to the range of controversies from the Popish Plot to the Exclusion Bill and Monmouth’s Rebellion. Keeping such a comparison in mind, it is obvious that the Coromantien section in Oroonoko signals a harem fiction with convergent allusions to the mistresses that Charles had left behind after a twenty-five-year reign. After the separation of Imoinda from Oroonoko occurs in Coromantien through the institution of the “Royal Veil,” Oroonoko is reunited with his mistress with the help of Aboan’s romantic intrigue with a “cast-mistress” of the king’s, Onahal. Onahal’s assignations with Aboan help Oroonoko to get secret audiences with Imoinda. Onahal’s role is reminiscent of harem intrigue as a stereotypical form of court politics; Mahmut in The Turkish Spy will recognize that spying and the veiled woman are equivalents, and there-

60

chapter one

fore he too “converse[s] (like our women in Turkey) under a veil” (5:89–90). Onahal could well be yet another allusion to Behn’s predicament—unpaid by Charles II for her spying activities in Antwerp and perhaps Surinam, so that she was an unpaid agent if not quite a “cast-mistress”—and indeed, as I have also suggested, there is considerable evidence in the text for Behn’s fantasy identification with some of Charles’s aristocratic mistresses.53 The roles played by the narrator in the Surinam sections are multiple— minder, manager, keeper, and entertainer of Oroonoko on the estate of the governor-proprietor, Lord Willoughby of Parham, during his absence. The narrator entertains the African prince with stories of Romans (and Imoinda with stories of nuns) and also admits (if somewhat inadvertently) that her role is utterly compromised. The narrator has to distract Oroonoko from political activity and thoughts leading to rebellion and freedom. The faction-ridden context of Surinam in the early 1660s, where Cromwellian Parliamentarians were still at large, is also evocative of local intrigue dividing the Royalists from each other, involving Deputy Governor William Byam and his Irish agent James Banister, actual historical figures. In keeping with the slippery evasion of authority and accountability that spies possess, the narrator can report on the execution through surrogates who were present, including her mother and sister. However, she secretes herself: “I, taking Boat, went with other Company to Colonel Martin’s, about three Days Journy down the River.”54 While Oroonoko conforms to aspects of the surveillance chronicle and the general characteristics of Enlightenment Orientalism, its investment in questions of translation and genre makes it a very sophisticated fictional artifact as well. Behn accurately writes down one of the rules of this genre in the context of discussing the innocence of the natives of Surinam: “Where there is no Novelty, there can be no Curiosity.” In this regard, the travelogue function of the text furnishes “curious” accounts of marvels and words from the native language.55 It might be added as a corollary that if curiosity requires novelty, surveillance will likely be the technique for generating that novelty. Processed by a hermeneutics—whether of credulity or suspicion—information from the genre of surveillance may involve domestic desires and foreign affairs, transcolonial voyages and translational interpretations, early Enlightenment-style critique and Orientalist generality and relativism. Oroonoko is a text where different kinds of secrecy cohabit, requiring multiple modes of translation. Early on, the natural language of courtship among the Indian lovers observed by the narrator is a sign of the “absolute Idea of the fi rst State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin.” At the

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

61

other extreme, there is the violent interanimation and translation of three very different kinds of bodily mutilation—the ritual scarification of the Coromantees, the competitive self-mutilation of the Indian generals, and the violent decapitation of Imoinda and attempted suicide by Oroonoko. To understand these acts fully, the reader cannot resort to meanings residing within any specific culture—English, Peeie, or Igbo—but needs to attend to the novelistic hybridization, citationality, and translation from bodily practice to narrative decoding. Much in the novella requires contextual decipherment and explanation—whether the system of slave lots devised at the early stages of plantation slavery, or the “Ceremony of Invitation” whereby Imoinda is sent the “Royal Veil,” or the religious fetishism and indigenous healing practices of the Peeie Indians, who “cure the Patient more by Fancy than by Medicines.”56 This treatment of native healing as fraudulent legerdemain has some bearing on the function of the material context, itself producing a “romance effect” rather than the practices themselves. As Behn says in the epistle dedicatory to Lord Maitland, “If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange.”57 This particular sentence is a stunning reversal of the usual genre accusation sounded against romance, that it produced implausibilities out of the formulary of chivalric conventions. Rather than romance producing false novelties, empirical novelties create romance effects. Truth is stranger than fiction, then, and the novelty is not necessarily produced by contrast between the literarily fanciful and the recognition effect of the familiar. The experientially unfamiliar is the true outside, new and strange, that one kind of novelistic realism aims to capture; while Michael McKeon has termed this belief “naive empiricism,” such an understanding of it can only be from a retroactive and informed perspective that is not that of the original teller, who is not necessarily naive. Behn was a translator of Bernard de Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds (discussed in chapter 3), and it is not surprising that in her hands, the surveillance chronicle aims to map the outside and bring it home for translation and analysis, along with other elements of the defamiliarized familiar, such as political happenings among colonists and slaves. In a preface to the Fontenelle translation, titled “Essay on Translated Prose,” Behn suggests that the point of translation is to make the unfamiliar empirically available, and thereby the translator is justified in staying as close as possible to the author’s true meaning. Behn is critical of Fontenelle’s conjectural astronomy; at

62

chapter one

the same time her Oroonoko skeptically synthesizes a tale of transcontinental magnitude.58 If we were to take these lessons from Oroonoko and move chronologically to a consideration of Delarivier Manley’s scandal chronicles and Eliza Haywood’s anti-Walpole satire (as I do in chapter 5), something else would emerge. Rather than treating all these morphings of identity as feints behind which some essential Englishness or womanliness can be found, these fictions testify to a historical space that is still profoundly unfi xed, featuring “fantasy machines,” as John Richetti has called them, vehicles featuring both force and fraud as Toni Bowers’s dissection of eighteenth-century feminocentric seduction narratives reveals.59 Talking of a “New Atalantis” as an island in the Mediterranean or a “Countess of Caramania” within a sea of European royalty can mean an interanimation between the looseness of transcultural trafficking and the fi xity of specific national context. The roman à clef aspect of fictions by Behn, Manley, and Haywood—increasingly referred to as secret histories—also reveals the later realism to be an arm’s-length reaction formation to these earlier tell-all forms, which are, as scandal sheets, too close to truth to be realist and often more predicative than subjectifying, or in the case of Oroonoko, experimentally inhabiting all three movements, including that of desubjectivation. Further, the Royalist ideology of these women writers makes them cosmopolitan and xenotropic, rather than parochially English in the manner of the Whiggish novelists of several decades later. It is only to be expected that the tropes of translation and found manuscripts feature prominently in many of these early novels that are obsessed with the relation between here and there, now and then, domestic and foreign.60 The recognition of literary history’s later nation-centered gatekeeping function would ultimately lead to revising the origins of the early English novel as “nobody’s story,” but in a much more expanded sense than Catherine Gallagher has defi ned it—in other words, as a multi-sited translational utopianism, a clearinghouse for multiple languages, polities, religions, and ethnicities rather than just a specific gynotropism dealing with the literary commodification of English women writers.61 And though there certainly are national realist strains that claim preeminence by midcentury and after, these were deified at the expense of countercurrents that continued to pull away from the dominant “posited essence” of realism as Bakhtin has it—whether these be the later oriental satires, adventure tales, or gothic romances. Daniel Defoe is the likely author of sixty-three letters of a spurious ninth volume of A Continuation of the Letters of a Turkish Spy published

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

63

in 1718, using the fictional vehicle to discuss the political history of Europe from 1687 to 1693.62 Clearly an admirer of the Marana text, Defoe justified his predecessor’s fictional plain style: “The best Rule in all Tongues [is] to make the Language plain, artless, and honest, suitable to the Story, and in a Stile easie and free, with as few exotick Phrases and obsolete Words as possible, that the meanest Reader may meet with no Difficulty in the Reading, and may have no Obstruction to his searching the History of things by their being obscurely represented.”63 As a piece of Williamite and anti-French as well as antipapal propaganda, the continuation is written in a brisk style with no digressions, touching on military news, moral advice, and political commentary without much experimentation—that is, Defoe is using a textual model that by that point had been tried and tested and proven spectacularly successful. The book’s tone is less confessional than Marana’s, and national characteristics do not appear as extensively as they do in the predecessor text. One interesting passage for our purposes is a reflection on the love of narrative falsehood among Europeans’ accounts of non-Europeans: These Nazarens [Christians or Europeans] are the most addicted to Fiction and Forgery of any People that ever I met with; it is a received Custom among them, that whenever they have to do with any Sect or Opinion of People, differing from their own, the fi rst thing they go about is, to represent them as monstrous and unnatural, either in Person or in Principle, or perhaps in both; dressing them up in ridiculous Shapes, and imposing a Thousand Stories about them upon the Credulity and Ignorance of the Vulgar, that they may entertain immoveable Prejudices and Aversions against the Persons and Principles they profess.64

The point that Defoe makes here through Mahmut is that “absurd romantic Tales,” “imaginary Histories,” “innumerable forged Stories,” and “fabulous Miracles” told by Christians about Islam are thoroughly ideological and politically motivated. These forms of aggressive slander resemble a wry reverse Occidentalism typical of Enlightenment Orientalism: Defoe employs a deliberate nonrealism to narrate the West into a parallel ethnographic time that Johannes Fabian later called “nonallochronic,” even as the East is depicted as rational and universal in its vision.65 This is the precise opposite of high nineteenth-century Orientalism tout court, although of course one might think that the main point about Orientalism as Partha Chatterjee has argued is not its Althusserian problematic,

64

chapter one

where practitioners put plus and minus signs in terms of attributes of East and West, but the thematic, or the assumption that East and West have contrasting and essential cultural attributes, no matter what they are and how they are coded to sustain the idea of civilizational difference. Unlike modern Occidentalism, which could be thought to be tit for tat for latterday Orientalism, this is a humorous tit before tat, or perhaps an imagined rejoinder to medieval Christian slanders against Islam.66 Defoe had also modeled his volumes of The Family Instructor (1715–18) on Marana’s potent moral dialogue as a reflection upon scenes of human life; while Marana focuses on political history and Mahmut’s advice to various correspondents, Defoe alters the balance exclusively in favor of the concomitant duties of participants in family life. Marana’s work and its continuation appear transparently to us as a device, but Maximillian E. Novak suggests that “audiences unaccustomed to reading a form of fiction so imbued with history were ready enough to take the account as real.”67 Of course, as a governmental spy and informer, and a protofeminist, as well as a secret religious dissident, Defoe might have had more than a passing interest and identification with a character such as Mahmut. In his letters, Defoe characterizes The Turkish Spy as “the books I Take as They Are a meer Romance” but heartily approves of the idea of commentary from the perspective of a penetrating diplomatic intelligence.68 Furthermore, Novak draws a direct line of influence from Mahmut’s melancholic fits to the occasionally lunatic possessions undergone by Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe’s fi nal “Vision of the Angelick” in the Serious Reflections (1720) bears a strong resemblance to Mahmut’s “ramble through an infinite Space” and his encounter with comets in the last volume of The Turkish Spy (8:26–29), and it is certainly indebted to Fontenelle’s New World cosmologies, to be discussed later.69 While many of Defoe’s other novels (especially Captain Singleton [1720], Colonel Jack [1722], and Moll Flanders [1722]) correspond to the Bakhtinian idea of a novel without emergence, featuring a hero as “a moving point in space,” his fiction The Fortunate Mistress (otherwise known as Roxana [1724]) is of great significance for its realistic depiction of paranoid conspiracy within a transcultural/translational plot. The title page manages to allude to Britain, France, Germany, and Turkey all at once; almost the fi rst thing we hear from the protagonist is that she is the daughter of Huguenots and speaks French fluently, thereby having access to the lingua franca of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe (37).70 Some of the generic brilliance of Roxana derives from the combined power of the surveillance chronicle, the scandal chronicle, and Oriental exoti-

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

65

cism. The fiction is a double-time throwback to the Restoration era and the activities of Charles II’s court and his numerous concubines, as well as a scandal chronicle alluding to the court of George I and his German mistresses, encouraging an overlay of early eighteenth-century bourgeois values and sharp dealing by Quakers, high-priced prostitutes, and slippery spies.71 It is also a reconstruction of a time when the Ottoman threat to Europe was still significant, as well as being a double-coded reference to the aristocratic excesses of the age of Louis XIV. Terms such as “Intelligence” and “Information” feature prominently in this text.72 Political conspiracy, fi nancial peculation, and sexual scandal are closely related. Sexual violence, indeed what appears to be an attempted strangulation, can be a subterfuge concealing the nobleman’s gift of an expensive diamond necklace to the title character; on another occasion, Roxana’s personal intimacy with the French jeweler turns out to be the prolegomenon to a long and arduous attempt to secure his goods as hers upon his unsolved murder (73, 53–57). Roxana’s profession demands perpetual disguise and the rejection of immediate biological ties through escape, payoff, subterfuge, or murder, whether in familiar or unfamiliar circumstances. The difficulty caused by running into her brewer husband in Paris is “solved” by her close confidante and servant Amy, as is her discovery of her daughter Susan in London.73 Amy is the predicative function of Roxana, whereby we see the Todorovian hypothesis about the Nights applied to a domestic fiction. Roxana and Amy are morally if not physically conjoined twins, with Amy being the predicative instrumental rationality of her subjectively confessional mistress. While Roxana wrings her hands at her sins even while avidly counting her monies, Amy is doing the needful disposing and dispensing of anything—and anyone—who may come in the way of exposing Roxana’s secret identity. Roxana’s Turkishness is a domestication of the foreign as a delightful and exotic artifice. This novel is perhaps typical of the foreign-oriented fictions of Enlightenment Orientalism we have been considering, embodying what William Warner has called a “fantasy of the fungibility of identity.”74 The 1720s see the decline of the open-network transcultural novel in English, when the gates of domestic realism begin to clang shut and when a generic price will have to be paid to exit the moated castle of the domestic realism preferred by the bourgeois Briton. A previous Roxana was the wife of the Turkish sultan Amurath and the legendary oppressor of Amurath’s heir Bajazet. Roxana (or Roxolana) was already a name for multiple literary and historical characters of Turkish provenance. The name of the wife of Alexander the Great and also of Suleiman the Mag-

66

chapter one

nificent, in the period Roxana becomes a “generic name for an oriental queen, suggesting ambition, wickedness, and exoticism,” in texts such as William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (1656), Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1677), Roger Boyle’s Mustapha (1665), Jean Racine’s Bajazet (1672), and Charles Johnson’s The Sultaness (1717).75 Most famous of all literary Roxanas is Usbek’s favorite wife, who rebels against his sexual authority and breaks off the Enlightenment project of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters with her suicide note, which is also a metaphorical letter bomb. By profession and reputation, Defoe’s Roxana has, by her own description, become “a meer Roxana,” a public woman, actress, and counterfeit of the real thing (182). This is why Roxana earns her name by sheer chance and contingent public acclaim, when she fi nishes her pretended Turkish dance before the king “and one of the Gentlemen cry’d out, Roxana! Roxana! by —, with an Oath; upon which foolish Accident I had the Name of Roxana presently fi x’d upon me all over the Court End of Town, as effectually as if I had been Christen’d Roxana” (176). Thus Roxana’s Turkishness is more style than substance, based on a tourist encounter and acquisitions enabled by her French nobleman during their two-year Grand Tour through Italy. In Naples (or at Leghorn, as she says later [173]), “my Lord bought me a little Female Turkish Slave, who being Taken at Sea by a Malthese Man of War, was brought in there; and of her I learnt the Turkish Language; their Way of Dressing, and Dancing, and some Turkish or rather Moorish Songs” (102). However, the actual dance interpreted by Roxana is “a Figure which I learnt in France when the Prince de —desir’d I wou’d dance for his Diversion; it was indeed, a very fi ne Figure, invented by a famous Master at Paris, for a Lady or a Gentleman to dance single” (175). Taken in, one of the gentlemen in the audience swears he had seen that very dance in Constantinople; on another occasion, Roxana holds her own with two Persian ladies who danced Georgian and Armenian dances respectively (176, 179–80). She hints that the faux-Turkish dance performed yet again on this occasion wins her the biggest prize of all—the status of mistress to the king himself for more than three years. In the sexual union of British monarch and faux-Turkish French-speaking mistress we could fi nd the subordination, if not the surrender, of the foreign to the national.76 At the same time, while the subjective Roxana is style personified, the action-oriented part of her is Amy, her genie in the magic lamp, Friday to her Crusoe, or perhaps Morgiana to her Ali Baba. Roxana’s feminist individualism and commercial advancement, like Aladdin’s and Ali Baba’s, is enabled by the faithful English woman-servant who performs the selfless task of protecting and advancing her mistress to bourgeois riches.

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

67

The tropological labor of the Oriental is never far from the narrative surface of these texts. Likewise the character’s and the costume’s unraveling by the end suggests a desubjectivation on the heels of an attempted, provisional subjectification. A national self is just as provisional as its exotic vehicle. Yet Roxana will have to pay an exaggerated scapegoat price for her inspired turquerie: discovery and fear of exposure at the hands of her daughter, Susan. Therefore, when an exasperated Roxana declares after the marriage to her Dutch merchant toward the end of the narrative that she would not care to be “known by the Name of Roxana, no, not for ten Thousand Pounds,” it indicates that the foreign can survive, but only as an unacknowledged and hidden scandal within bourgeois conventionality. Being exposed at this point “wou’d have been enough to have ruin’d me to all Intents and Purposes with my Husband, and everybody else too; I might as well have been the German Princess” (271). This is the ultimate irony—Roxana is not referring to a foreign royal as much as to the famous bigamist and impostor Mary Carleton, who claimed to be “Maria von Wolway” and therefore of German royalty. Carleton’s confidence trick was exposed in the 1660s, and she was fi nally hanged for theft in 1674, but only after she fully exploited the “serial subjectivity” that, according to Mary Jo Kietzman, gave her agency in the shadowy underworld of crime.77 This is also a palpable hit at George I’s German mistresses; the duchess of Kendal had very recently bilked the nation during the South Sea scandal. Imposture and foreignness, roguery and royalty come very close to each other and cannot be ultimately disambiguated. If the claim to the foreign turns out to be a badly disguised form of roguery, speaking the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe in the manner of Chaucer’s Prioress, or the German of George I’s carpetbagging retinue, it is an indication that an interest in geographical horizontality is being trumped by a fear of vertical social porousness. Roxana—despite all her Frenchness, Germanness, and Turkishness— turns into nothing more than a costume for a high-class English whore. But if the multilocal referentiality of the open-network transcultural novel has been dismissed by the novel’s conclusion as an empty chimera of disguises, it is worth noting that the ground of national realism has also been undercut. Roxana’s true identity is never revealed, and she remains elusive and unnamable all the way to the end, generating many critical contortions by scholars who cannot reconcile this fiction with national realism. In the meantime, the Quaker with whom Roxana takes refuge to hide from her daughter Susan turns into another surrogate agent in the man-

68

chapter one

ner of her servant Amy; Roxana refers to the Quaker as her “faithful SPY, (for such my QUAKER was now, upon the meer foot of her own Sagacity)” (309). In the manner of many of Defoe’s Quakers, Roxana’s surrogate misleads Susan and plots Roxana’s removal while managing not to tell an outright lie. The problem of Dutch intrigue also comes to the surface, as it did in Behn’s transnational spy chronicle. It is possible that the Dutch connection, through Roxana’s husband, serves as a placeholder for economic globalism in the novel, especially as there was fierce competitiveness between the British and the Dutch for Asian trade at this moment. The Dutch connection represents a way back into the wider world even as the English walls begin to close in around Roxana.78 By the conclusion, all that is left of the Turkish themes of the surveillance novel is Roxana’s inexorable guilt, identity crisis, and immitigable melancholy. Indeed, this sense of impending doom and imminent danger is how The Turkish Spy also concludes: Mahmut’s Jewish correspondent, Nathan ben Saddi, has been mysteriously murdered, and Mahmut is increasingly fearful of meeting the same fate. Is it possible that both Marana and Defoe are surreptitiously revealing to us the dead end of the domestication of the foreign with Mahmut and Roxana, and the bitter fruit of external spying, which yields nothing but internal solitude? Marana’s, Behn’s, and Defoe’s tales break off with news of the recent murder of an intimate and the foreboding that this news generates. This underside is important to excavate and hold up for examination. The surveillance chronicle, the oriental adventure, and the secret history are not opposed to bourgeois domesticity and its putative autonomy. Rather, they present a world of heteronomies and divergences that speaks of the centrifugality of the transcultural and the translational. By underwriting all these confusing morphings with continuous narratives and stable identities, the English novel ideologically recuperates fiction for the nation, thereby becoming the monolingual opposite of what Bakhtin means by novelistic heteroglossia. Enlightenment Orientalism could be seen as ironically demonstrating the heteroglossia that Bakhtin credited not just to national realism but to the novel writ large.

THE DOMESTICATION OF THE ORIENTAL Though rarely acknowledged, the chronology of the oriental tale closely matches that of the domestic novel. As Robert D. Mayo documented some time ago, the Original London Post or Heathcote’s Intelligence serialized

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

69

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe at the same time that Churchman’s Last Shift rendered The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor in twenty installments. The London News of 1723 serialized both Robinson Crusoe and Sindbad the Sailor. The Nights was published in 445 installments over three years. As late as 1785, Novelist Magazine again serialized Robinson Crusoe and the complete translation of the Nights. General Magazine, Lady’s Magazine, and Monthly Extracts continued to feed the demand by publishing extracts from the Nights.79 Why is it that the Nights is always mentioned in passing with respect to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction but rarely engaged with in any direct way? It would be impossible to determine which text—Crusoe or the Nights—has had greater influence in the last three centuries. Both texts have acquired mythic status in world literature, and while critics customarily contrast their fictional modes, the intervention of the supernatural in Crusoe is as irreducible as the use of realism in the Nights is obvious. Foe, J. M. Coetzee’s novel, builds on Crusoe’s already existing irrationalities concerning the supernatural, and the stories featuring Caliph Haroun al-Raschid in the Nights often display entirely realist assumptions concerning fictional sociologies, storytellers, and audiences. Indeed, several eighteenth-century observers did not see a clear demarcation but addressed the two kinds of text from the same perspective. Important readers such as Edward Gibbon had always thought of the Nights as politically useful, but the tales’ relevance for history and political thought does not always win them appreciation as literature of the fi rst rank.80 As we saw, Todorov celebrates the Nights as a metafictional immanence of sheer narrative bounty, a symbolic repository of story as affording breath, life, reprieve, and survival. According to his appreciative response, silence is equivalent to death, and the endless chatter of the tales is a utopian excess of narrative fluidity and multiplicity. The Todorovian world of adventurous exteriority revels in supplementary excess (in contrast to the Jamesian world of medical symptomatology, proceeding from action-oriented consequence to the detection of the subjective cause). Out of the seemingly “empty” narrative come forth many other stories, travels, miracles, and life itself. The Nights, by such an interpretation, is a self-perpetuating story-machine that reveals the fecundity of literature and narrative as a transcultural activity outside the confi nes of historical closure, and is therefore a cycle always oriented toward the future, a storyin-waiting for many moments of contingent narrative opportunity. Todorov’s provocative account is willful, as the Nights can certainly yield evidence for opposing hypotheses. For example, his analysis would

70

chapter one

falter if confronted with some of the tales in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, such as “The Story of Beder, Princess of Persia and Giahaure, Princess of Samandal,” “The Story of Noureddin and the Fair Persian,” and “The History of Aboulhassen Ali Ebn Becar, and Schemselnihar, Favourite of Caliph Haroun al Raschid,” which are romantic love stories rather than action fictions. Both predicative adventure and subjective romance are necessary for modernity, and perhaps for all literary production—and indeed both modes are present in full measure in whichever version of the Nights we might want to examine.81 Georges May takes the opposite tack to Todorov’s, seeing Manichaean oppositions of antipathy and sympathy develop vis-à-vis certain characters in the Nights, but such a reading demonstrates that the depth psychology of domestic realism cannot be applied willy-nilly. Noting a conspiracy of silence in French literary history concerning the Nights, May suggests that Galland’s text is an “invisible masterpiece” of capital influence.82 The kind of denegation that May discovers in France exists throughout contemporary literary criticism of the period in Britain. For example, James Beattie’s 1783 disquisition “On Fable and Romance” dispenses with the oriental tale fi rst before getting on to the task of classification of all other fiction. While Beattie grudgingly concedes that “the Oriental nations have long been famous for fabulous narrative,” he decries the oriental tale as relying too much on “inchantment and prodigy” involving “fairies, genii, and demons, and wooden horses, which, on turning a peg, fly through the air with inconceivable swiftness.”83 The oriental tale is a vehicle through which “authors expatiate, with peculiar delight, in the description of magnificence,” a sign to him that Oriental great men (for whom he mistakenly presumes the Nights was written) don’t understand simplicity but prefer splendor. Beattie’s prejudices against the estrangement effects of the marvelous soon reveal themselves to be contradictory, as in the very next breath he deprecates Galland’s translation as an overfamiliarizing one. “If [the tales] be Oriental, they are translated with unwarrantable latitude,” exemplified by the fact that “the Caliph of Bagdat, and the Emperor of China, are addressed in the same terms of ceremony, which are usual at the court of France.” French authors cannot endure, it seems, “anything else but the fashionable forms of Parisian civility.” Rather than remaining unsure whether the original or the translation is to blame, Beattie wants to demonstrate Galland’s utter lack of merit by amply blaming both. The proponent of Scottish common sense was greatly concerned that the Nights was so familiar to youths and children as to spread only ignorance and impropriety.84

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

71

However, there were also critics in the eighteenth century, before Beattie, who understood that the value at stake in the oriental tale was not the narrow one of realist mimeticism. John Hawkesworth (later to be author of a significant English oriental tale, Almoran and Hamet) writes about the supernatural events in the Nights with much greater confidence: “The action of the story proceeds with regularity, the persons act upon rational principles, and such events take place as may naturally be expected from the interposition of superior intelligence and power: so that though there is not a natural, there is at least a moral probability preserved, and our fi rst concession is abundantly rewarded by the new scenes to which we are admitted, and the unbounded prospect that is thrown before us.”85 Suggestions such as Hawkesworth’s reveal that the intelligence behind the oriental tale combines various kinds of verisimilitude in relation to the “unbounded prospect” that promotes moral over sociological realism. Despite this rationalization, there is joy in excess: “the mind should with pleasure acquiesce to the open violation of the most known and obvious truths.”86 Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785), with which I began this chapter, has been important for nonteleological feminist recontextualizations of the novel-romance debates and also helps decipher the period’s investment in the oriental tale.87 Reeve renders an impressive account of the antiquity of the romance, tracing its development from the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs to its descent to medieval forms and fi nally to the French romances of the seventeenth century. We can already see demarcations between oriental fantasy and realist novels when Reeve’s energetic investigation of the manner in which the novel sprang out of the ruins of romance takes the realist goal of demonstrating how “as a country became civilized, their [sic] narratives were methodized, and moderated to probability.”88 Reeve is not always positive about the Nights, which she acknowledges had “raised a swarm of imitations,” at one point characterizing its stories as “all wild and extravagant to the highest degree; they are indeed so far out of the bounds of Nature and probability, that it is difficult to judge of them by rules drawn from these sources.”89 For these reasons of unboundedness, her contemporaries, “upon reflexion . . . despise and reject them.”90 But Reeve’s novelistic practice belies her theoretical caution, as the tale appended to her text Charoba, Queen of Egypt is resolutely Orientalizing, indeed itself out of the bounds of nature and probability. Reeve had retranslated Pierre Vattier’s seventeenth-century French rendering of an Arabic original by Murdada ibn al-Afi f.91 Perhaps Reeve is not making an absolute value judgment in her comment on the Nights but attempt-

72

chapter one

ing a hierarchical classification; in fact, it is possible to argue, given her own promotion of Charoba, that the difficulty of assessment she identifies with respect to the Nights is precisely what entitles her to freely fashion her own version of an Eastern fable.92 Reeve is interested in a syncretic account of fiction as an “Eastern” mode brought to the West by the Crusades, or even earlier, by the Greeks from the Egyptians. There is something naive about this outsourcing of fable to the mysterious East, even as Reeve’s Euphrasia is obsessed with “methodizing” (by far her favorite word) the origins and kinds of fiction available to late eighteenth-century readers. On the one hand, “methodizing” suggests the technique that rendered Orientalist fiction into the Enlightenment mode that became familiar especially after Montesquieu, though the efficacy of the mode derives from the deployment of techniques such as Marana’s “immethodical” observations. The scattershot could constitute a method of its own. This outsourcing is no creative fabulation of Reeve’s but a standard displacement that can be traced back to Huet. In fact, Galland had corresponded with Huet about some of his translations from the Nights. Reeve may have had similar information from Thomas Warton’s “On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe,” which prefaces his History of English Poetry, volume 1 (1774).93 Huet and Warton are but critics who purport to track the fount of all wisdom to sources in the East, a simple transference of the mystery of origins from tropology to topography. The mysterious and fabulous East is assumed to be the origin of all fiction, and yet this attribution is a treacherous assertion masquerading as an acknowledgment and a gift.94 Through her mouthpiece Euphrasia, Reeve puts an end to the tired ancients-vs.-moderns debate still pursued by one of her interlocutors, the oldfashioned Hortensius. Pointing out that epic characteristics are arbitrarily high when the same can be found in low genres, Euphrasia’s instincts are towards a kind of genre-egalitarianism, that genius can be found and ought to be respected in all literary forms.95 Reeve lists an unusually high number of oriental tales among her favorites of the romance form: Mirza and Fatima, an Indian Tale; Tales of the Genii; Inatulla; Abassai; Loves of Othniel and Achsah; Chinese Anecdotes; Miscellany of Eastern Learning; and The Visiers, or Enchanted Labyrinth.96 The raillery among Reeve’s characters—an erudite Euphrasia, a priggish Hortensius, and an impressionable Sophronia—echoes a similar metafictional triangle in the Nights, where the misogynist Schahriar is reeducated by Scheherezade, the brilliant storyteller, with the assistance of her sister Dinarzade as interlocutor. Dinarzade, of course, started off as Scheherezade’s maid in some ver-

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

73

sions and then turned into her sister, and by Reeve’s triangulation, the two women are clearly allies in besting the unimaginative conventionalism of an oppressive male’s verdict. Through the critical dialogue, it emerges that Hortensius wants all novels banned, while Euphrasia wants the good ones admitted. Sophronia, the moderator, tacitly allows Euphrasia to dominate and triumph over Hortensius’s unenforceable position. Hortensius’s conservatism echoes Schahriar’s, while Euphrasia’s intelligent moderation and Sophronia’s solicitation of narrative echo Scheherezade and Dinarzade respectively. While Reeve’s demonstration of the Orient as the origin of fable is a second-order fable of its own accord, Richard Hole’s disquisition Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1797) takes a nearly opposite tack, defending and deciphering the Sindbad voyages as indebted to Western classical sources and also a variety of travelers’ tales. Painfully aware that there is considerable negative reaction in high literary culture to the orientalia of the eighteenth century, Hole begins with the observation that “when Europe was immersed in barbarism, all polite learning passed under the designation of studia Arabum.”97 There is much ground for Hole to recover, as he perceives a massive critical and aesthetic rejection of the Nights, indeed a scapegoating of stories that works through suggestion and indirection: “The sedate and philosophical turn from them with contempt: the gay and volatile laugh at their seeming absurdities: those of an elegant and correct taste are disgusted with their grotesque figures and fantastic imagery; and, however we may be occasionally amused by their wild and diversified incidents, they are seldom thoroughly relished but by children, or by men whose imagination is complimented at the expence of their judgement.”98 In response to the question whether the Arabs are “as children in intellect, and ourselves [Europeans] arrived at the maturity of knowledge,” Hole chooses to expose the existence of the marvelous in European literature from the Greeks to Milton and Shakespeare.99 Thus the tabulation in the Nights is verified as mature and worthy of respect by literary classicism (ranging from Homer, Herodotus, Plutarch, Lucian, Milton) and literal-minded travelers’ tales (Marco Polo, Mandeville, Strabo, Purchas). The literary and the literal, the purely fantastic and the purely realist, the Orientalist and the Enlightened—all potentially antagonistic directions of explanation and appropriation—are reconciled with each other in a manner that explains a variety of transmogrifications. The confusion of origin that Reeve preferred to resolve in favor of “the East” is left ambiguous. As he expounds upon the well-known parallels between Sindbad’s tales

74

chapter one

and Homer’s Odyssey, Hole suggests that “a gentleman, perfectly conversant in Indian Literature, has observed, ‘that the Odyssey itself, its giants, fairies, living ships, magicians, witches, &c. are derived from the ancient compositions of the East.’”100 Reeve and Hole do not participate in the late eighteenth-century trend of solidifying and proclaiming national literatures. Their references are widely comparativist and transcultural. Most of the time their critical discourse participates in an outstretching toward geographically and historically distant sources. Attempting to familiarize themselves with a transcultural imaginary, they are aware of a larger audience that is increasingly either uncomprehending or hostile. Reeve and Hole set themselves up as interpretive conduits and translators rather than as jealous guardians of national boundaries. They were perfect practitioners of Enlightenment Orientalism in the wake of the Nights—praising Eastern-sourced fiction for its philosophical and cultural relevance and cautioning that not only the local or the national but also the remote and the transcultural may turn out to be insightful and render moral and anthropological truths. Late into the eighteenth century, as the trend was shifting to romantic nationalism and xenophobia, Reeve and Hole keep the flag flying for a cosmopolitan, and indeed global conception of literature that anticipated Goethe’s Weltliteratur. h In this chapter I have proposed that the pseudoethnographic fiction of the period can be placed within the context of a horizontally integrative “geography” of transcultural influence and exchange, rather than the more familiar vertical and genealogical “history” of the national model. The latter was itself a product of later eighteenth-century and Romanticist models of national culture that retroactively synthesized “the novel” as a particularity arising from a range of disparate genres and modes. In this respect, the agency ascribed to “the novel” is a displaced function of the teleological project of constructing national culture. Reinvestigating the fictional circulations of the period as a series of transcultural/translational chronotopes rather than as a national ideology has taken us to the consideration of different theoretical models and other kinds of archival evidence. I have sought to demonstrate that self-reflexive fiction arises as an intergenre, achieving translational/transcultural power through performative characteristics such as “prosaics,” “novelization,” and “unfi nalizability” as defi ned by Bakhtin, rather than by the establishment of “one” genre

Fiction/Tr anslation/Tr anscultur ation

75

that defeats various literary competitors—such as the romance or the oriental tale—through monolingualism. Reading fictions—even just English and French fictions—as provisional translations linked to fictional elsewheres allows us to understand them as cultural transportation devices that carry something over from afar, both in the literal sense of metaphor (meta-phorein, to carry over) and also in the documentary manner of metonymy, which has been more frequently associated with narrative fiction. To pluralize these contexts into the “other realisms” of early eighteenth-century fiction is also to dissent from accounts that propagate “the” novel as self-same. It is the argument of this book that there is novelty in this world of the long eighteenth century, but that this novelty stages itself as inherently translational. Within this interpretive framework, how can the supposedly realist development of the early English novel be rethought in relation to important best sellers from the Continent, including Marana’s The Turkish Spy, Antoine Galland’s translation retranslated as Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes? What impact do these fantastic fictions have if studied further, alongside the scandalous “fantasy machines” constructed by Behn, Manley, and Haywood? How does fiction look when it is defi ned as transcultural currency rather than as national particularism? Why is it that only later English literary criticism invests exclusively in this word, novel, while literary critics in most other European languages are content with cognates of words, or concepts, that link back to the many strands of history and romance, story and tale, adventure and conte? Interpreting the period’s fiction as emblematic of an era of scientific empiricism and moral didacticism, novel promoters often assume the triumph of one kind of fiction over others because they favor particular elements of sociological accuracy that streamlined inchoate desires, morals, and pleasures. It is almost as if this national realist fantasy fulfi lls a subsection of one of the categories that Bakhtin identifies, the idyllic chronotope that restores the immanent unity of folkloric time—except that this would be an ironic advance from what Bakhtin identified as the rural idyll—to the Benjaminian “empty time” of national realist narcissism defi ned by Benedict Anderson. As a character of Friedrich Schlegel’s says in an aside about the novel, “I detest the novel insofar as it wants to be a separate genre.”101 From the perspective of Enlightenment Orientalism, generic solutions in favor of a singular outcome eschew the harder task of making available a variety of perceptions about the relationships between particular national realisms, comparative externalities, and universal aspirations.

ch apter two

Oriental Singularity: Montesquieu, Goldsmith, Hamilton

L’auteur s’est donné l’avantage de pouvoir joindre de la philosophie, de la politique et de la morale à un roman, et de lier le tout par une chaîne secrète et, en quelque façon, inconnue. [The author took the opportunity to integrate philosophy, politics, and morality with a fiction, connecting all of them up with a secret and unknown chain.] —Montesquieu, “Quelques refléxions sur les Lettres persanes” (1754) That satire which in the mouth of an Asiatic is poignant, would lose all its force when coming from a European. —Oliver Goldsmith, Monthly Review (August 1757)

T

he period from the 1680s to the 1720s installed the oriental tale as a major fictional genre. Three French publications were foundational to this establishment, not least because they all became enduring best sellers in English as well: fi rst, Giovanni Paolo Marana’s pseudoethnographic epistolary classic L’espion turc / The Turkish Spy, which sparked off dozens of imitations and an entire subgenre of “spy fiction”; second, Antoine Galland’s multivolume translation (or transcreation) of Mille et une nuits / Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, whose influence on world literature is vast and ongoing; and third, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes / The Persian Letters, which perfected relativist epistemology while maintaining realism and antirealism within the same representational mode. These fictional exercises in literary Orientalism, dealing with Turkish, Arabic, and Persian contexts respectively, began to feature India and China, reflecting back to European observers a “surrogate or underground self,” in Edward Said’s words. A side-by-side reckoning of national selves and Ori76

Oriental Singularity

77

ental selves (both being fictional, if in somewhat different ways) created the parallel structure of self-destitution and delegation to the other that Alain Grosrichard describes in his masterpiece on Montesquieu, Structure du sérail / The Sultan’s Court.1 Building on the possibilities for pseudoethnography exploited by Marana and Galland, Montesquieu constructed a unique aesthetic structure that eschewed the compendiousness of his predecessors and instead aimed for the effects of singularity that characterized his innovation. Rather than the cumulative outcome of a multiplicity of exotic attributes, the oriental tale would hitherto be signaled by epistemological alterity. As we will see shortly, the investigation of alien culture often leads to the discovery of singularities as expressive of difference, but when the search for singularities becomes the feature of the genre, it accelerates its eventual obsolescence, as the aim to surprise through narrative cannot survive repeated exposure. There has been much speculation about Montesquieu’s reference to the secret chain undergirding his fiction.2 Did Montesquieu mean that the fiction was a roman à clef, or was he referring to a heterogeneous distribution of themes and tropes to create maximum effect? Is the metaphor of the chain about spatialization or sequentalization? These possibilities are overlapping rather than exclusionary of each other. Montesquieu is careful to assert that the reader fi nds the text to be une espèce de roman—a kind of a prose fiction. The various characters are also linked by a chain that connects them with each other (“les divers personnages sont placés dans une chaîne qui les lie”). Montesquieu wants to deny the possibility of a sequel, something that he deems impossible, given the singularity of the original. 3 This is a quaint assertion to make three decades subsequent to the original publication in 1721, decades that had already spawned a ferocious number of imitations, leading to a subgenre of pseudoethnographic epistolary fiction that proliferated after Montesquieu’s success, even if the invention of the genre can be credited to Marana. It is also a dangerous assertion to rely on, especially as it was written after the publication of De l’esprit des lois and Montesquieu might have been tempting himself and his readers to read the earlier fiction retroactively through the political assertions of the later treatise. The brilliant innovations of the epistolary form of Lettres persanes radicalize incipient qualities that had been unexploited by previous exponents.4 The multiple correspondents and recipients who produce and read the 161 discrete letters within Montesquieu’s fiction demand a secularizing and skeptical framework of interpretation. The sequencing of the letters violates chronology. A metanarrative emerges behind them, leap-

78

chapter two

ing over the partial perspectives and temporal hiatuses made visible. The role of the reader as sleuth is enhanced as the author’s behind-the-scenes editorial role is revealed, and the contingent process of reading favored by Enlightenment trumps any secret chain. “Quelques refléxions” was written partly as a defensive measure against the attacks on heretical aspects of the text by critics such as Abbé Gaultier, whose pamphlet Les “Lettres persanes” convaincues d’impiété (1751) also attacked Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois and the materialism of the Encyclopedists. As Perry Anderson has also noted, the concept of singularity is central to the way the fiction was received.5 Montesquieu suggests that Usbek’s and Rica’s fi rst thoughts “must have been really odd [singulières] and all that could be done was to grant them the kind of exceptional status [espèce de singularité] that is compatible with intelligence.” Furthermore, “if they sometimes fi nd our beliefs odd [nos dogmes singuliers], this oddness [singularité] is the result of their absolute ignorance of the way in which these beliefs are linked to our other truths.” The gambit of cultural comparison consists of “the eternal contrast between things as they are [les choses réelles] and the odd [singulière], new, or bizarre manner in which they were perceived.” Singulier/singularité proliferates throughout the Lettres persanes, even though, as just exhibited, English translations are forced to substitute a family of related terms such as “odd,” “strange,” “unfamiliar,” and “exceptional” to characterize the insights of the travelers as contingent ethnographers studying their hosts. Cross-cultural insights strike the fi rst-time observer as unique. Yet the exercise of fi nding equivalence originates from a presumable even-handedness. Even as one tendency of cultural comparison is to fi nd new equivalences—Catholic priests are like Islamic dervishes, eunuchs mediate between the master and his wives as bureaucrats mediated between Louis XIV and his subjects—these evennesses leave strange remainders. To call the Oriental a mere device is a post-translational perspective that dissolves the “other” into a universalizing metaphor. In contrast, the Persian traveler’s fresh vision largely derives from leveraging outsiderness. Are the white and black eunuchs analogical to the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe, and if so, where does this extended analogy lead? What was singular once cannot be as singular twice: the sharp edge of an odd insight is evened out by our increasing familiarity with it. When odds become evens by translatability and cultural exchange, singularities vanish. It is the singularity of the oriental tale that Montesquieu highlights, but as we shall see, singularity will also become the oriental tale’s death-knell.6 Montesquieu’s creation of Oriental singularity in eighteenth-century

Oriental Singularity

79

fiction took the publishing world by storm. As Rica’s interlocutor asks, clearly grasping that the condition of defamiliarization is a desired vantage point: “How can one be Persian?” (“Comment peut-on être Persan?” L.30). In other words, how can one aspire to a singular vantage point from which all utterances have the likelihood of communicating instant novelty and whose import, upon reflection, leads to apprehending unfamiliar truths? As a Persian, Usbek had himself learned the capacity to observe as an outsider during a previous trip to India (L.146). At the same time, Oriental singularity was vanishing even as Montesquieu’s fiction was widely read. That was the paradoxical sign of its erstwhile success. The literary commodity will not last forever, and neither would Enlightenment Orientalism or many other subgenres of prose fiction.7 There are at least three angular (and indeed uneven) ways in which Montesquieu deploys his fundamental insight regarding the singular vision of the cultural traveler, yet they are all dimensions of singularity that the text made into its most enduring message. The fi rst angle of singularity pertains to the status of the harem fiction within the larger fiction as a whole: the plot of the roman du sérail as “introduction” and “conclusion” to the work is far in excess to its functionality for enabling social satire of the French, for which the Persians are used as mouthpieces throughout the tale’s substantial middle.8 The tendency of a large number of readers has been to subordinate, if not entirely ignore, the harem fiction as a “mere” Oriental device, while believing that the real target of Montesquieu’s text is the political instability of Regency-era France, the catastrophic absolutism of Louis XIV before, and the disconcerting effects of John Law’s failed fiscal reforms just after. After all, harem fiction is the preoccupation of forty letters, or just one-fourth of the entire work, whereas the remaining three-fourths pertain to a range of disparate topics that are more directly linked with French social and political conditions. However, neither the harem fiction nor the satire of French society would be as effective without the other, and the side-by-side elaboration of the two unequal parts creates a stereoscopic vision that might very well be the overarching metaphor of Enlightenment Orientalism.9 The second unfolding of singularity in the fiction pertains to the exploration of other subplots that juxtapose inner and outer space variously as private and public, domestic and foreign, or familiar and unfamiliar. These interpolations include the famous story of the Troglodytes, the incestuous tale of Aphéridon and Astarté, and a tale borrowed from Pétis de la Croix concerning Anaïs and the false Ibrahim, about sexual frustration and its logical outcome. Montesquieu’s interpolations pointedly attempt

80

chapter two

to achieve aesthetic singularity and political application, therefore activating the so-called secret chain that links politics, philosophy, and morals. Third, the all-encompassing but abstract concept of justice, as it frames Lettres persanes, is a simultaneous consideration of both cultural equivalence and incommensurability. Justice appears to have aspects of both oddness and evenness, inimitable incisiveness as well as repetitive proportionality. Montesquieu’s obsession with justice and public right (droit public) permeates the text through multiple tropes and registers, whether through the figure of the eunuch who implements the law of the harem or the philosophical disquisitions on chaos and its historical repercussions, such as the essays on depopulation. As Dena Goodman has cogently pointed out, a single word, fidélité, encapsulates the bond of loyalty that equates the relationship of subordination between wife and husband with the political one between the subject and prince and the religious one between the believer and God.10 Through fidélité and its breakdown, domestic disorder and political anarchy become intertwined and even indistinguishable. Fidélité is the keyword that defi nes the system of social bonds in love, friendship, and politics. When the fidelities break down as spectacularly as they do, the text enacts an autoimmune, and indeed suicidal, disorder. While justice is proposed as the alternative to fidelity, such justice is never realized. Rather, the events of the narrative enact a spectacular failure— an ironic contrast with transcendental justice. This concern with justice is a very significant feature of Enlightenment Orientalism, which aims for transcultural and moral insights even if they remain speculative gambits rather than accomplished truths. Singularity is but one name for a spectacular exhibitionistic function that includes a capacity to vanish. Following this threefold exposition of Montesquieu’s creative defi nition of Oriental singularity as an essential dimension of Enlightenment Orientalism, I discuss Lord Lyttelton’s Persian Letters (1735) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762) as successors to Marana, Galland, and Montesquieu, before going on to Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) as a late-century cultural translation. All these versions of pseudoethnography produce social satire by motivating cultural distance. It is worth examining these oriental tales as critical experiments in the armory of a grander Enlightenment Orientalism, enacting a philosophical attitude that queries multiple conventions and institutions. Singularity still works—but only just—at the dying moments of this generic intervention. Oddness has not yet been evened out by overexposure and mechanization. Lyttelton’s, Goldsmith’s, and Hamilton’s innovations on the heels of Marana, Galland, and Montesquieu bring us to

Oriental Singularity

81

appreciate an experimental paraliterature that cannot just be classified and dismissed as evidence of an ephemeral interest in exoticism. Attending to these texts across the century plumbs potential transcultural values and allows for a more generous rewriting of the received history of Orientalist fiction in Britain and France. Later critics forgot these cosmopolitan commitments while lusting after national realism and progress narratives.

MULTIPLE SINGULARITIES Rejecting any simple understanding of the seraglio as an allegory of monarchy, Alain Grosrichard suggests that Montesquieu’s idea of despotism is based on a phantasm rather than a socially verifiable fact. As Judith Shklar had already argued, the Orient for Montesquieu was “not a geographic area but a nightmare territory of the mind in which all the worst human impulses govern.”11 To be sure, phantasms that circulate around political power are consequential even if illusory. Having coined the word despotism as a noun, Montesquieu made a series of false assumptions regarding the conduct of politics in Asia. But what if we realized that the phantasmatic nature of the political is constitutively performative for those who believe in the projected figment? Oriental singularity is generative politically. The harem as a polygamous social unit makes visible a context of estrangement and forced participation. In European analyses of the harem, natural-law understandings of human agency are pitted against the prohibitions of positive law and the brutal hierarchies sustained by it. The harem allegorizes classes and social bodies (corps) in the French monarchical context. When the harem fiction is taken as a political allegory, its main thrust concerns the eunuchs as intermediaries in a kind of bureaucracy that implements laws but also relays subjects’ demands to sovereign power. Usbek’s harem is evoked through letters that arrive from afar and help the reader imagine the crisscrossed lives, from Paris to Isfahan, unfolding over narrative time. Contingent exchange, from letter to letter, exposes distance, familiarity, and misrecognition on a sliding scale of applicability and enjoyment. The constitutive singularity of the harem is dissolved into pleasurable recognition when its connoted French equivalents appear allusively in the margin. Usbek’s confessional statements present several interpretive difficulties. In the very fi rst letter, he claims to have left Persia for the pure motive of the pursuit of wisdom; yet shortly thereafter he acknowledges that his departure was a feint. Usbek had fallen out of royal favor because he had exposed the flattery of the king’s minions. Meanwhile, Usbek’s ini-

82

chapter two

tially feigned interest in learning had become genuine (L.8). Is this an endorsement of moral luck?12 Usbek’s desire to escape the constraining effects of Persian despotism determines his departure into exile, much as the conclusion to the work demonstrates his inability to reform his domestic tyranny. Enlightenment’s self-contradiction stands revealed: the harem fiction, therefore, is not just window dressing but the essence of the conundrum. As a result, Lettres persanes pivots around critical counterpoints. Distanciation allows the fresh perception of novel truths but also obscures other wisdoms. Transcultural universality is the aspiration even as cultural relativism is the default position. The self-canceling nature of Montesquieu’s insights in Lettres persanes liberates it from the heavy-handed cultural stereotyping that characterizes his later treatise De l’esprit des lois. Genre makes meaning: the fl inty lightness of fiction allows plurilocal reference that spreads criticism universally, whereas the structure of the political treatise cannot easily accommodate both irreverence and nonreference. When reference to cultural particulars is nailed down, irreverence hardens racial epistemologies, and the negative “cultural ontology” of Orientalism reemerges retroactively. Some of the details of the harem plot will demonstrate the emergence of political and cultural singularities alongside fictional accounts of the mediations between Usbek and his wives. The fi rst letter from a wife, Zachi, recounts a day the women spent in the country after having commanded the eunuchs to take them there (L.3). Soon this letter turns into a passionate complaint about Usbek’s abandonment of his wives for unhappy wandering in barbarous lands.13 Insubordination is to be managed constantly: the First Black Eunuch complains that he cannot have a single serene day or even a tranquil moment. Interaction with the women complicates his effectiveness; as a youth, he was perpetually afraid of being exploited by the women he guarded if they managed to see beyond his severe facade and discover his secret tenderness (“J’étais perdu si elles m’avaient pénétrées,” L.9). It has taken him a lifetime of self-control to achieve indifference and even hatred toward the women he guards. While Zachi is revealed as unfaithful and disobedient, having committed improprieties with a white eunuch and a female slave, she only sets the pattern for other betrayals that are to follow. The next complaint, from another wife, Zéphis, pertains to the tyranny of the First Black Eunuch, who has confiscated her personal slave (L.4). Very early on in the fiction, therefore, the stage is already set for insubordination leading to revolt. A plaintive Usbek writes to a Turkish friend, expressing proleptic fears regarding malfeasance and chaos in the harem: “Wouldn’t I prefer

Oriental Singularity

83

concealed impunity a thousand times to well-publicized chastisement?” (“N’aimerais-je pas mille fois mieux une obscure impunité qu’une correction éclatante?”, L.6). Usbek would prefer to maintain appearances when confronted with a sordid reality. A kept secret is preferable to public reform, as the latter will lead to Usbek’s embarrassment and humiliation. By accepting that his loss of face during a public reimposition of virtue would be less palatable than countenancing the secret existence of transgression, Usbek shows that he prioritizes public honor over actual virtue. Relatedly, the complaints of another wife, Fatmé, are disturbing to Usbek because of her candid acknowledgment of unquenched sexual desires (L.7). By the time he reaches Smyrna, he is so concerned about chaos in the harem that he sends back Jaron and a number of black eunuchs to his harem in Isfahan as reinforcements (L.22). Communication and surveillance go hand in hand. Usbek had formally delegated his power to the First Black Eunuch very early, calling him his faithful guardian, gatekeeper, and enforcer (L.2). The eunuchs dynamically implement the legitimate desires of Usbek’s wives even as they order them around when enforcing the rules. The increase of surveillance proportionally increases the duplicity of the surveilled, who learn to feign virtue while under observation. Eventually Zélis writes to Usbek, now in Paris, claiming that she has greater freedom of action than he does despite being incarcerated (L.62). Claiming to have enjoyed countless pleasures while Usbek languishes in separation from his wives, Zélis dares him to redouble his surveillance, concluding that a more suspicious vigilance would only show his greater psychological dependency. After the passing of three years since Usbek’s departure, the First Black Eunuch reports that complete civil war has broken out among the harem women (L.64). The anomalous and wasteful structure of the harem is in full evidence when a fresh Circassian beauty is bought for Usbek’s delectation even a year later (L.79). The harem creates lust and disgust among the wives and jealousy and anxiety for Usbek. The disastrous denouement takes a few more years to happen. Zélis, Zachi, and Roxane severally transgress the rules of sexual propriety. Letters go missing or remain unopened. A power vacuum follows the First Black Eunuch’s murder. Usbek’s authority eventually collapses from its internal incoherence.14 The harem as phantasmatic site derives from the particular way in which Montesquieu, and his precursors such as Paul Rycaut, had orientalized Aristotle’s political theory by categorizing the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals as tyrannical regimes a priori while locating the idealized versions of monarchy and republic within European space. The despot (Gk.

84

chapter two

despotes), a term that in ancient Greek society unpejoratively referred to the paternal head of the family, whose home (oikos) could contain women, servants, and slaves under his civil authority, was semantically collapsed into an equivalent of the tyrant (Gk. turannos), who ruled out of unnatural passions and perverse excess. The harem is portrayed as a self-enclosed but also a self-exploding system—an implicit criticism of Enlightenment Orientalism, which would normally favor wisdom over ignorance, but as a perverse allegory of monarchical absolutism, Montesquieu’s critique is ambidirectional. Written from the heart of the ancien régime, his tale means something different from a postrepublican equation of European aristocracy with Eastern tyranny to reform the former. Enlightenment Orientalism arises as a transcultural but negative universal, revealing by ironic reversal and stereoscopic vision rather than positive dictum that would instrumentalize the Oriental example in relation to the Occidental outcome. Wisdom is hollow and the self is contained in the other, breaking down the cultural boundary. Fiction is about deciphering cultural distance, as it was for Marana and Behn, rather than celebrating domestic familiarity. Persia and France are disparate, unfree, and self-contradictory, but in shared ways. In this phantasmatic projection of Shklar’s “nightmare territory of the mind in which all the worst human impulses govern,” residents of the harem have to identify negatively with the fragmented bodily functions of the despotic ruler. Some exist for the continuation of his line, others for his lust; some maintain his status, others are surplus expenditure, disposable upon a whim. The women who exist for the despot’s pleasure are never sexually fulfilled, given that he is just one body and they are legion; the eunuchs who exist as custodians of the women madden them by controlling their access to the despot.15 The eunuchs realize that because of their castration, they possess a quotidian physical intimacy with the women that no real man could ever be allowed to have. Yet their position derives from being able to represent one half of the absent master (“nous ne représentons que faiblement la moitié de toi-même,” L.96). The master is aware that his sexual authority has to be implemented by these managerial surrogates, whose enjoyment of the women takes on a vicarious intimacy. It is only rarely that the husband can enjoy the dominant role of a Paris-like judge who decides a contest among his women (L.3). Most of the time, the women can exercise indirect power through frustrating and deceiving the eunuchs and each other, while their licentiousness spills over into ersatz intimacy with the eunuchs and each other. The eunuchs learn that sexual deficiency enhances creativity; they taste a kind of pleasure in

Oriental Singularity

85

the company of women that is unknown to men (L.53). As the First Black Eunuch asserts regarding the relationship between eunuchs and women, “there is between us an ebb and flow of domination and submission” (L.9). Firmness combined with surveillance allows eunuchs to be dominant. Soft power is the norm and brute force the last resort. Techniques for surveilling women are handed down from one eunuch to another. The First Black Eunuch’s mentor taught him to “read [women’s] thoughts and their dissimulations, their contrived gestures and their feigned expressions did not fool him [ne lui dérobaient rien]; he knew their most secret activities and their most secret utterances” (L.64). In Montesquieu’s harem we fi nd walls within walls, boxed identities, and straitjacketed selves, much like the structures pictured in Marana’s pseudoethnography. A surveillance society relies on internal rivalries within the subject population. As the First Black Eunuch reports proudly, his job is easier when the group of women under supervision is larger: “a greater need to be attractive, fewer resources to be able to unite together, and many more instances of obedience: all this puts them [the women] in chains” (L.96). The women spy on each other and make the eunuchs’ jobs that much easier. Separation is fractally multiplied, and the role of the eunuch as symbolic divider derives from his initial self-estrangement through castration (L.15). While acting as the gatekeeper and killjoy who prevents the women from turning to illegitimate pleasures, the eunuch is also the self-effacing intermediary who organizes the sanctioned union of man and woman under the regime of polygamous heterosexuality. As the eunuch Jaron says, “We have placed hatred between women and ourselves and love between men and women” (L.22). That ideal is ironically reversed on a daily basis. Given the degeneration of the relationship between Usbek and his various wives, and the inability of the eunuchs to keep order since repression creates only a greater desire for insurrection, the last redoubt of Usbek’s idealization of marital concord rests with his favorite wife, Roxane, who is the subject of an extraordinary epistolary apostrophe by him early on (L.26). Blindly idealizing her earlier behavior, Usbek compliments Roxane for her beauty, virtue, and modesty and exults in his sexual ownership of this new bride, whose face has not even been seen by her father-in-law. Usbek loves Roxane for what he sees as the suicidal ardor with which she defended her virginity against him. Husbands’ random violence against wives is an expected feature of Persian society. Despite Usbek’s oscillation between static idealizations and paranoid insecurity, there is also banal progress in the harem. The rivals Zachi and

86

chapter two

Zéphis reconcile, and Zélis informs Usbek about the celebration of his daughter’s seventh birthday and her increasing disenchantment with the prisonlike conditions under which the wives live (L.47, L.52). Imminent disorder, tenuously controlled, has become a prevailing feature of the harem, but it takes awhile until the structure’s eventual collapse is envisaged (L.54, L.147). The fi rst letter in harem favorite Roxane’s voice appears very late in the fiction. Given the idealization of her virtue and innocence from early on, Roxane’s complaints regarding the draconian aspects of the eunuch Solim’s new regime fi rst come across as pathos-ridden pleas for mitigation (L.156). These pleas are redoubled by the already compromised voices of Zachi and Zélis, following which the new eunuch in charge, Solim, drops a bombshell concerning Roxane’s infidelity (L.157, L.158, L.159). Solim’s decision to take the law into his own hands is preempted by her defiant and excoriating suicide note, which brings down the entire symbolic structure of the harem (L.160, L.161). Roxane has turned from a vacuous ideal of feminine virtue into a vengeful virago who strikes back on behalf of all cowives, while confessing to the maximum possible betrayal of all the ideals of feminine virtue and marital fidelity.16 Claiming to have enjoyed many secret delights and pleasures during her career, she wreaks a calculated revenge that leaves Usbek’s surveillance structure in a shambles. Roxane initiates a new language of subjective self-empowerment, even though it is followed by the act of suicide (“Ce langage, sans doute, te paraît nouveau” L.161). Ironically, the wheel has turned full circle from Usbek’s self-justifying departure from the Persian court in response to the appearance of a language of flattery that he could not stomach (“J’y parlai un langage jusqu’alors inconnu,” L.8). Tyrannical rule has ended in tragic failure, betrayal, and grief. An exile that began with the highlighting of Usbek’s sincerity at court ends with the bitter consequences of his utter hypocrisy as master and husband. While the harem fiction generates one form of singularity, the narrative structure of Lettres persanes multiplies these outcomes by artfully compiling interlocking narratives and interpolations. As in Mille et une nuits and other oriental tale collections, the multiplicity of dovetailed stories nuances approaches to problems even while maintaining distinctiveness. Epistolary fiction allows for philosophical reflection, journalistic reportage, and political satire. The chronology of the letters is not always continuous. The arrangement of the last sixteen letters, dealing with the chaos in Usbek’s harem, creates the breathless pace of a concluding episode only if we choose to ignore their temporal separation, as they range over three years, from 1717 to 1720 (L.146–61). A tragic fi nale is created

Oriental Singularity

87

through narrative compression. The irony of the conclusion is enhanced upon the realization that Montesquieu had suggested alternate comic endings to illicit passions through earlier letters. Rica’s letter to Usbek concerning the interpolated harem tale of the false Ibrahim and Anaïs precedes the fi nale, even though the letter is dated after the fi nal suicide note from Roxane (L.141, L.161). The two stories undo each other, providing different ideological solutions for the same problem. Given the time frame, the juxtaposition of the two stories is ironical, even though the irony will be discerned only by the occasional reader who steps back from the narrative flow to ponder the differing outcomes. The licentious tale of Anaïs and Ibrahim is an adaptation from Pétis de la Croix’s Mille et un jours: Contes persans (1710–12). Montesquieu presents it as a “Persian tale” that Rica sent to a French court lady curious about harems. Narrated by a holy woman called Zulema, the tale suggests that virtuous Muslim women who go to heaven will be rewarded there with the services of male sexual slaves. Zulema tells of Anaïs, one of several neglected and abused women belonging to Ibrahim’s harem. Stabbed to death by her husband when she boldly criticizes his behavior, Anaïs arrives in paradise.17 There she fi nds her sexual needs repeatedly satisfied by handsome men in bucolic surroundings. Remembering her promise to avenge her frustrated cowives, left behind to endure Ibrahim’s mistreatment, Anaïs sends one of her male attendants down to earth to mitigate their suffering. Assuming the physical form of Ibrahim, the celestial impostor enters the harem and immediately begins a sexual marathon. Even though the wives realize his imposture, they accept the false Ibrahim because he performs the conjugal functions their husband did not: “You are more of an Ibrahim in a day than he could be over ten years” (L.141). The celestial gigolo punishes the taciturn original by spiriting him away to a distant location. Furthermore, the impostor throws open the harem, liberating the women from the veil and instituting sexual desegregation. When the actual Ibrahim trudges home from his forced exile three thousand leagues and three years later, all his hoarded wealth has been spent. He rediscovers his wives along with the thirty-six children they produced while he was away. The interpolated tale needs to be read as a farcical alternative that preemptively parodies the Isfahan harem plot. Placed after the series of letters on depopulation, this interpolation suggests that harems are inefficient as social structures of conspicuous consumption (L.112–22).18 The sexual dissatisfaction of the women also bears social and economic consequences. The radical transformation of Ibrahim’s harem emphasizes the

88

chapter two

reproductive growth that was being pitched as necessary for the greater social good by the Physiocrats throughout the eighteenth century. If the Isfahan harem plot ended in a tragic singularity, the story from Pétis suggests a bumptious farce. The possibility of alternative resolutions to tragic social outcomes for women is explored frequently throughout Lettres persanes. For instance, Rica reports that a traveler to India witnessed a woman about to commit sati, who decided not to immolate herself upon learning that in heaven she would be reunited with her jealous husband. It turns out that, just as in the Anaïs episode, sexual frustration is key. The young widow had been seduced by two young priests who had misled her concerning religious doctrine. Now, fully apprised of the undesirable outcome that self-immolation would bring, the woman decides to turn Muslim instead (L.125). The moral of such tales is utilitarian avant la lettre. Montesquieu demonstrates that the differential singularity of plot outcomes is subject to the rules of genre expectations, however similar the basic situations. Sexual fulfi llment and female enjoyment trump social propriety and male domination. Comic survival beats out violent death. In yet another interpolated tale drawn from Orientalists Jean Chardin and Thomas Hyde, Montesquieu takes frustrated sexuality into an incestuous romance with a happy ending. The tale of Aphéridon and Astarté, narrated to Usbek by Ibben, features siblings from the minority Guèbre or Zoroastrian community who fall in love with each other but are initially prevented by their father from marrying out of fear of Muslim disapproval (L.67).19 After enduring the setback of Astarté’s sale into the king’s harem by their father, followed by her marriage to a white eunuch, Aphéridon woos his sister by convincing her of the superiority of Zoroastrianism. They elope to a distant spot, where they are married according to ancient rites, and move from Persia to Georgia to avoid apprehension. After further travails during which Astarté is kidnapped by Tartars and Aphéridon sells himself and their infant daughter into slavery to pay the ransom for his sister-wife, the couple fi nds salvation through a generous Armenian merchant who manumits them in exchange for a year’s servitude. This tale makes a bold attack on the incest taboo under the guise of cultural relativism. While the romance plot lurches toward several catastrophic scenarios that would have disallowed incest by way of symbolic punishment, the laconic conclusion is inferentially utilitarian. Montesquieu explores a happy outcome for fraternal incest that would scandalize conventional French morality then or now.20 The much-discussed interpolation regarding the Troglodytes nar-

Oriental Singularity

89

rated by Usbek demonstrates how Oriental singularity makes possible Enlightenment political construction (L.11–14). The fictionality of political philosophy featured within the oriental tale is crucial for the exercise, demonstrating that both Orientalist fiction and political philosophy are speculative genres that make visible the political and cultural analysis motivating Enlightenment Orientalism. The Troglodytes, a group in Arabia who evolve through various systems of government, alternate between primal selfishness and altruistic goodness. In indirect dialogue with Hobbesianism, the fable exhibits several conundrums despite its deceptive simplicity. Individual liberty without a social conscience is punished among the Troglodytes, but then so is their desire to place all their trust in the hands of a monarchical figure. Their founding event was the assassination of a cruel king of foreign origin, and this was followed by the massacre of ministers of the representative government that arose immediately after. Lapsing into a Hobbesian “state of nature” featuring anarchic liberty, the Troglodytes suffer from their selfishness and unwillingness to help each other. Property is tenuous, and violence and theft are endemic. Ungrateful and unable to reciprocate, they drive away assistance from strangers. The group nearly goes extinct, but one or two surviving families initiate a new form of primitive communism within a rural atmosphere of diligent virtue. Mutual respect and generosity develop among them until they are subject to an invasion by foreign raiders, whom they nonetheless manage to repulse by republican ardor. However, the Troglodytes ultimately succumb to luxury and the temptation of a monarchical system of government that frees them from personal responsibility. The venerable elder whom they ask to be their king berates them for their decadence. Montesquieu appears to suggest that honorable monarchy is severely deficient when compared to virtuous republicanism. Between a monstrous despotism and moral republicanism, monarchy is the default middling option. However, it is in a state of constant tension and tends to degenerate toward either despotism or republicanism (L.102). While the republican hope is that virtue will become second nature for all, the monarchical via media provides social persuasion that replaces the republican love of virtue and fear of the law with monarchical love of honor and fear of opinion, as Montesquieu would argue explicitly in De l’esprit des lois.21 The fable of the Troglodytes and other minor diversions in the Lettres persanes are fictionally superior to the involved analyses of the later political treatise. As speculative asides without the dogmatic flavor of a political tract, ideas about social alternatives could be broached without tarring entire societies or cultures with the stigma of backwardness or inferiority. Fiction

90

chapter two

was the positive dynamic of Enlightenment Orientalism, while newly developing social scientific discourse would do something much more along the lines that Said accuses nineteenth-century Orientalism of doing. Montesquieu, then, is the perfect cusp figure who embodies Enlightenment Orientalism in Lettres persanes but anticipates colonialist ideology in De l’esprit des lois. The fictional nature of the Troglodyte fable makes it an inspired aside, a trial balloon subject to ironic deflation rather than a fullfledged philosophical disquisition with ponderous assertions of truths. Within epistolary fiction we can also encounter multiple views concerning literature. Rica praises French drama but describes the modern French epic as failed. He criticizes the lack of realism in European chivalric romances, comparing them to prodigious occurrences in Eastern fables (L.137). In doing so, he repudiates fantastic literary forms (whether European or Oriental) and aligns himself with developing realist expectations. However, the juxtaposition of fabulist and allegorical interpolated tales and essayistic and sociological reflections makes for uncertainty concerning the status of fictionality and the concern whether representational languages remain stable enough to be decoded reliably. Metaphor and analogy, especially in the harem fiction, are up-ended by performance and irony. Rica characterizes the king and the pope, the two most powerful figures in the social life of eighteenth-century France, as magicians who can force their followers to believe in incredible doctrines. If political reality strains credulity, fiction offers alternative verities. Among these parallel fictions that illuminate the roman du sérail from a number of angles, the reader encounters various butts of eighteenthcentury social and political satire—lawyers, actresses, priests, antiquaries, society ladies, and wits. French targets can range from Louis XIV’s absolutist rule to daily fashionmongers, and from the theological pretensions of Jansenists and Jesuits to one of Montesquieu’s favorite topics, John Law’s failed economic reforms during the Regency, which led to rampant inflation and complete loss of confidence in the money supply, lampooned in an allegorical fiction featuring Law as the child of Aeolus (L.142). Clever satire on the discourse of current events hawked by intelligencers, quidnuncs, and journalists demonstrates all the problems of naive realism, including audience gullibility (L.130). Book learning and academic controversies also have their pitfalls, as the series of letters featuring Rica in the monastic library reveals (L.133–37). Flanked on all sides by these multiplying instances of satirical reportage, sociological disquisitions presented in Lettres persanes, such as the famous letters on depopulation and political economy, appear suspended

Oriental Singularity

91

in intonational quotation marks (as Bakhtin terms this discursive innovation), suggesting the possibility of a fictional reversal or a sudden ironical twist (L.112–22). The rhetoric of the letters on depopulation is oriented toward extracting moral and philosophical lessons, imagining that inefficient political structures and religious doctrines—such as polygamy or celibacy—result in a decline in the population and ultimately threaten human survival. Montesquieu indirectly edges toward utilitarianism with touches of libertarianism and promotes political arrangements that maximize the freedom of individuals, but not at the expense of collective social goods. While the harem fiction and the multiple interpolations systematically exploit the aesthetic effects of the singular inimitable instance of wisdom, justice promises a transcultural universality of assessment as that which lies beyond inassimilable singularity. Could justice be an ideal of the pseudoethnographic oriental tale, which thereby attains to the philosophical thought-experiment that Montesquieu envisaged? On the one hand, Lettres persanes demonstrates the spectacular failure of any promises regarding justice. Especially ironic is Usbek’s own pronouncement: “Justice is a true relationship of appropriateness [convenance] that is found between two things: this relationship is always the same, whoever considers it, whether it be God, an angel, or fi nally, a man” (L.83). Usbek’s defi nition of justice depends significantly on the idea of appropriateness or suitability (convenance). Justice, in this passage, appears to require harmonious correspondence between separate entities, matching up hitherto unexplored aspects, massaging singularities into evenness, or what we may call predictability. A careful assessment of the fiction would not, however, take this assertion at face value, as justice is shown to be a hubris-ridden ideal. The irony being addressed by Usbek’s defi nition is that justice, while impartial and disinterested, acquires the status of the singularity it seeks to banish. Justice’s call is unheeded: “men do not always see the relationships that Justice indicates; often, even when they do see them, they distance themselves; and their interest is always what they see most clearly. Justice raises her voice, but she can barely be heard above the tumult of the passions” (L.83). As Usbek goes on with this reflection, he concludes that justice is a transcendental concept that endures even for those who do not believe in God. It is linked to the notion of equity, distributing and determining appropriateness, although as supreme mediator it is unequatable to anything other than itself. This is the paradoxical point: the justice that distributes evenness is elevated to a transcendental singularity unable to refer

92

chapter two

to anything beyond its own purity: “When a man examines himself, what satisfaction to discover that he has a just heart! This pleasure, as austere as it is, must delight him: he sees himself as being as much above those who don’t have justice as he sees himself as being above tigers and bears” (L.83). A just man fi nds superiority in demoting other men to brutes without reason. Universality becomes a lonely vantage point for the enlightened few, a singularity. But justice is not exactly served if it floats above everyone or everything. Rica reminds Usbek that we never judge except by secret recourse to ourselves. If triangles could imagine a god, they would give him three sides, the implication being that religion is an anthropomorphic affair (L.59). This insinuation is a direct attack on the church. We go on to hear that we would love justice even if there were no God (L.83). Rica’s reminder concerning the mad mathematician whose sense of proportionality is maniacal relativizes Usbek’s idealization of justice. Tzvetan Todorov neglects to document this paradoxical dead end of justice as inimitable singularity when he praises Montesquieu as the philosopher of moderation who rises above all particularisms.22 The problem is that justice is not of much use if it turns out to be a transcendental singularity that does not access the particular. Perhaps this gives us an indication of the delicate equilibrium that Enlightenment Orientalism enjoyed in its moment. One end of singularity is solipsism, yet too easy a dissolution of singularity into cognitive assonance leads to banal platitudes. The commutative properties of justice are again at issue in the discussion of the relationship between civil law and public right (droit public) in letters 94–95.23 Usbek’s exposition of public right homes in very quickly on the cynical use it is being put to by contemporary political philosophers: “This law, as it is practiced today, is a science that teaches sovereigns . . . how far they can violate justice without harming their interests” (L.94). Usbek goes on to expostulate: “What a project, Rhédi, to want to harden their conscience, systematize iniquity, give it rules and principles, and then accordingly draw consequences!” (L.94). Usbek’s attack is on the nascent discipline of political science as management tool for cynical sovereigns, perhaps in the tradition of Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. Usbek suggests that public right is better known in Europe than in Asia, but justification also leads to the cynical outcomes he is decrying. He deems the discourse of public right more insidious than despotism. While despots rule arbitrarily by reference only to themselves, the discourse of public right is a dishonorable art that perverts justice, making its inflexibility pliable.

Oriental Singularity

93

Montesquieu suggests, through Usbek’s voice, that public right should be done away with altogether and instead be replaced by civil law. In other words, the former should defer to the latter, applying the natural-law rationality of individual behavior upward to questions of adjudication among nations. Because disputes among nations are clear and transparent (for reasons I will discuss shortly), Usbek asserts that a judge would not be necessary to arbitrate between them, as would be the case in civil law. Is Usbek’s optimism misplaced, given that cultural difference is at least as hard to adjudicate as personal disputation? This question is not resolved in the text. However, a significant prolepsis in this section speaks to the eventual conclusion of the fiction with Roxane’s act of suicidal defiance. While nature has established different degrees of strength and weakness among humans, it has very often equalized weakness to strength with the addition of despair (L.95). The denudation of the subject of politics increases Roxane’s strength to retaliate out of despair, even if the outcome involves personal annihilation. Could we say that Montesquieu anticipates the suicide bomber at the end of the line as the ultimate outcome of the subject of Orientalism? Roxane’s suicide is a metaphorical letter bomb that destroys Usbek’s premises in both senses, by blowing up the epistemology of domestic polygamy. Usbek’s project is clearly oppositional to discourses of sovereignty and public right that until then had been heavily influenced by the doctrine of arcana imperii (or state secrets), which rationalizes and justifies sovereign behavior in matters of diplomacy, war, and peace, though from the outside such behavior might appear completely arbitrary. Montesquieu, through Usbek, is inductively constructing a new sovereignty theory based on natural law and the theory of personal behavior rather than the secret rules of international diplomacy and state reason (raison d’état). This is somewhat different from what happens in De l’esprit des lois, where natural law is just one component, along with climate and national temperament or spirit. Here we might see the glimmerings of a new system, the law of nations or international law, arising from the perspective of a hypothetical Persian observer who could document the excesses of absolutist monarchy under Louis XIV. French Jesuits in China had implicitly contrasted the rule of the great Qing emperor Kang-xi (1662–1722) to the Sun King’s: the latter had created religious intolerance with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, while in 1692 Kang-xi had proclaimed an edict of toleration, much praised by Bayle, Voltaire, and Leibniz.24 The cross-cultural perspective was crucial to justify such an international law as different from the projections of the national-realist triangles that would imagine

94

chapter two

their laws, in the manner of their gods, with three sides. Usbek lists several trivial reasons provided by states as a casus belli, reasons that would have been unacceptable if provided by individuals. Operating inductively upward, he fi nds very few reasons for a nation to declare war against another nation, equivalent to sentencing an individual to death in civil law: self-defense when attacked directly or, based on treaty obligations, in support of a friendly nation attacked by a third party. Usbek’s theory of justice attacks accumulated state reason and governmental secrecy and offers a transcultural alternative. Usbek, of course, stops mentioning justice when the situation in the harem dramatically deteriorates. He returns to fighting the losing battle in a tyrannical spiral that is unjust in essence, in the manner of the cynical political philosophers he was criticizing to Rhédi. By attempting to impose further punitive law, the eunuchs who are Usbek’s enforcers follow the example of the systematizers of iniquity he had so roundly criticized. Usbek acts privately, deducing “down” from notions of public right to his own family affairs, vitiating the outcome, rather than reasoning inductively “up” from civil law to public right, as he appeared to be recommending earlier while theorizing about justice and law. Hoist by his own theoretical petard, Usbek’s practice shows either that justice is not served despite his idealism or that his ideas concerning justice are unachievable. Or is this an internal critique of Enlightenment Orientalism’s aiming for an impossible Archimedean lever with which to bring the entire world within its purview? The singularity of justice, despite its promise of fi nding appropriate equivalence, is the ultimate result of the reverie of Enlightenment Orientalism in Montesquieu’s fiction. Small successes of analogical reasoning are followed by the catastrophic failure of the harem. The dream of an alternative mode of understanding fails even as local pseudoethnographic insights remain valuable. The thought-experiment unravels, showing the desirability but also the difficulty of thinking transculturally.

STRANGERS’ PERSPECTIVES Montesquieu’s singularities were not automatically translated into evennesses across the Channel. After its initial publication in 1722, Ozell’s English translation of Montesquieu was not reprinted until 1730. Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England to His Friend in Ispahan (1735) made Montesquieu truly English. Lyttelton’s text is relatively static, consisting of eighty-two letters from Selim, a Persian who discusses European

Oriental Singularity

95

politics and British government and society and retails the occasional personal romance to a friend named Mirza placed in Usbek’s city. The preface fl imsily pretends that the book is “certainly the Work of a perfect Stranger,” professing that “the Observations are so Foreign and out of the Way, such remote Hints and imperfect Notions are taken up, our present happy Condition is in all Respects so ill Understood, that it is hardly possible any Englishman should be the Author.”25 In keeping with Montesquieu’s focus, Lyttelton’s Selim claims to communicate to his friend “whatever in the Manners of the People appears to me to be singular and fantastical” (9). The reader is taken on the usual tour of eighteenth-century English curiosities, from an opera to a bearbaiting and from a gaming house to a debtor’s prison. The perplexity of the foreign observer is an opportunity for some deft turns of phrase. A gentleman at the bearbaiting can proudly proclaim it better than the pursuit of opera, because the latter speaks of “Taste of modern Rome, squeaking Eunuchs and Corruption,” but bearbaiting suggests “ancient Rome, Gladiators and Liberty” (14). A room where magicians appear to be in the act of conjuring actually features a high-stakes card game, where the players are staring at “Bits of painted Paper” as if they were surveying a mystical talisman. Selim expresses concern about gambling, which makes the wealthy go bankrupt through the machinations of cheats who make huge fortunes. His interlocutor answers him with the telling quip that “it is no Scandal to see Gamesters live like Gentlemen when Stockjobbers live like Princes” (22–23). Told about husbands who allow themselves to be cuckolded by their wives so they can be left alone, Selim responds with cross-cultural symmetry: “Our Persian Method was more reasonable, of having several Wives under the Care of one Eunuch, rather than one Wife under the Care of several Lovers” (42). The greatest direct tribute to Montesquieu comes from the eleven letters devoted to a reconstruction of the Troglodytes episode.26 As a Cobham Cub or “boy Patriot,” Lyttelton belonged to a Whig faction that had joined the opposition to Walpole after the unpopularity of the Excise Bill in 1733. There are several hits at Walpole’s culture of corruption and the bribery of the populace away from ancient “Gothic” principles of liberty. Lodging power in the hands of a Grand Vizier such as Walpole would be dangerous indeed (70). But legal reform and ideologies of progress are also skeptically rejected. As an old senator warns in his speech to the Troglodyte assembly, “By multiplying Laws, you will certainly multiply Defects . . . and if Justice is turned into a Science, Injustice will soon be made a Trade” (51–52). Deploring corruption in the English courts, Selim’s interlocutor

96

chapter two

compares English justice to a woman of quality: “The disinterested Spirit of the Lady is undone by the Rapine of her Dependants” (91). There is little discretionary power for judges in England when compared to France. Lyttelton’s text contains no complex theoretical speculations as in Lettres persanes. Selim’s England still contains common sense, sincerity, industry, politeness, valor, goodnaturedness, and liberty (323). Faults have only been newly introduced into England, and the main goal of the moralist should be the maintenance of liberty. Lyttelton’s England is a rosy place where the darker complexities of cross-cultural understanding rarely challenge the reader. Texts such as Lyttelton’s support the assumption that Enlightenment Orientalism was a mere device for internal satire, whereas precursor texts such as Marana and Montesquieu required greater hermeneutic depth and subtlety from their readers. But Lyttelton does take on Montesquieu’s concerns for justice, exposing hypocrisy and duplicity as a moralist would in the Tatler or the Spectator. Lyttelton was damned with some faint praise in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: “the Letters have something of that indistinct and headstrong ardour for liberty which a man of genius always catches when he enters the world, and always suffers to cool as he passes forward.”27 Noting that Lyttelton was the dedicatee of Fielding’s Tom Jones and a close friend of Pope’s, Pat Rogers argues that Lyttelton’s Persian Letters “stand alongside Thomson’s Liberty and Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques as a survey of the national mind. . . . They are like a Dunciad without, it is true, the coruscating imaginative energy, but also without some of the spite, without the melodramatic foreboding and without the personalization of intellectual issues.”28 While revisionary commentary might salvage Lyttelton’s Persian Letters as a minor classic that has practically disappeared from consideration by eighteenth-century scholars, his exploration of the structure of Enlightenment Orientalism was innovative. Ros Ballaster suggests that the shift from the French to the English oriental tale in Lyttelton’s case documents a simplification and also a displacement, in that there is a swift transition from the individual to the community in the English case. The singularities focused on by Marana and Montesquieu are no longer placed under critique. The individual becomes a cultural representative too easily, and the best of Enlightenment Orientalism collapses into the two-dimensional cardboard stereotypes justifiably criticized by later readers. The thinner and more instrumentalizing representations fi nd Orientals standing in for generalized cultural dispositions.29 To go back to Montesquieu’s tropological formulations, it is as if the measured evennesses of Lyttelton’s application dissolve the relentless focus on singular-

Oriental Singularity

97

ity in earlier versions of the stranger. A trope, a persona, even an entire genre such as that of the pseudoethnographic letter, is subject to the vanishing temporality of consequential effects. Subject to a self-canceling obsolescence, the best of Enlightenment Orientalism can be grasped only by subsequent reconstruction. There were many imitations of Montesquieu, from Germain-François Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Lettres turques to Jean Henri Maubert de Gouvest’s Lettres iroquoises. An especially interesting spinoff in the Irish context was the anonymously published Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to His Friend at Trebisond (1757), later attributed to Edmund Perry. The pseudoethnographer Aza writes to his friend Abdallah about the backwardness of the Celts, whose behavior echoes Montesquieu’s earlier description of the Troglodytes. However, when we consider Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), we fi nd a Chinese traveler, Lien Chi Altangi, who is both quotidian sage and comic butt. Goldsmith was fi rst interested in using an Ottoman character but decided on the Chinese option as it had become more fashionable by then through popular works such as the marquis d’Argens’s Chinese Letters, from which Goldsmith freely borrows. 30 By this point, the structure of Oriental impersonation is so familiar as to be a send-up, and yet there is always a share of gullible readers. Goldsmith’s preface highlights the lofty superiority of his protagonist: “The Chinese are always concise, so is [Altangi]. Simple, so is he. The Chinese are grave and sententious, so is he. But in one particular, the resemblance is peculiarly striking: the Chinese are often dull; and so is he.”31 Goldsmith was likely aware of the one-sided attack on Chinese officialdom in George Anson’s highly popular Voyage Round the World (1748). Anson’s text, ghost-written by Richard Walter and Benjamin Robins, recounts a litany of complaints that portray the Chinese as pompous, double-dealing, and lacking in initiative when contrasted with British sailors, who are shown as down-to-earth, straightforward, and courageous, for instance helping to put out a fi re in Canton while the Chinese dither. The travel narrative directly takes issue with Jesuitical idealizations of China, instead arguing that the bureaucratic structures of the state lead to corruption and avarice as well as a refusal to take responsibility. Anson’s account rewrites a long history of European sinophilia in terms of a racist disregard. As Robert Markley argues, other observers who deplored Anson’s high-handed actions in Canton refute his text’s pronouncements on Chinese bureaucracy. 32 Probably aware of Anson’s attacks, Goldsmith’s satirical logic is a kind of equal-opportunity bigotry that levels many forms of ethnocentrism:

98

chapter two

whenever Altangi waxes eloquent about China, he is undermined as pompous and unpersuasive; however, whenever his English interlocutors attempt to castigate China, they are revealed to be parochial and flawed. While the English ladies “make no scruple to laugh at the smallness of a Chinese slipper,” their Chinese counterparts would repay the insult by laughing at “the immoderate length of an European train” (60). It is but a short step, metonymically speaking, from the foot binding that restricted female physical movement in China to the extravagant clothing, such as trains and corsets, that had a similar effect on women in Europe. Who has a greater right to laugh at whom? And is laughter the best response, or is it outrage, or an even more shocking indifference to custom? Given that Altangi’s persona was initially adopted for a series of letters published in a newspaper, the Public Ledger, there is a tendency for the character to become a mouthpiece according to the topical necessities of the moment. Wayne Booth celebrates the journalistic origin of the letters as generative of the genuine art of the miscellany that has been forgotten today when we mostly judge literary merit on the basis of booklength works. Indeed, much Enlightenment Orientalism was published as ephemera and short fictions or nonfictions in newspapers and magazines. Perhaps this occasional context can help account for the incisive aspects of the textual singularities. 33 Booth pays close attention to the microstructures of the periodic sentences and the musical designs in these cumulatively linked essays, revealing also the evennesses of neoclassical harmony and thematic symmetry, along with pre-Romantic gambits given that multiple editions of the text were being brought out in the 1790s. Goldsmith appeals to the reader’s self-esteem, as well as fulfi lls a desire for the social satire of specific groups; he mixes up moral and philosophical commonplaces with new insights; and most important, he exercises a masterful distribution of irony, parody, and dramatic comedy with compressed brevity, all couched under the generalized sign of “Chinese” exoticism.34 Perhaps here too Goldsmith is relying on Anson’s attacks on China that included accusations that the Chinese are both very good at imitation and not good at it at all: “Their principal excellency seems to be imitation . . . [but] though they can copy the different parts, and can form some resemblance of the whole . . . yet they never could arrive at such a justness in their fabric, as was necessary to produce the desired effect.” Similarly, Chinese art is deemed defective for its “stiffness and minuteness . . . which are extremely displeasing [to Europeans].” Anson dismissed Chinese ideographic writing for all the reasons it was admired by others, as “a rude and inartificial method of representing words by arbitrary marks” that is

Oriental Singularity

99

very hard to learn and leads to miscommunication, obscurity, and a paradoxical overreliance on oral tradition. Cultural singularities can function as wonders but also as monstrosities. Chinese morality and government, panegyrized by the Jesuits, are seen as overrated. Anson uncovers moral dishonesty under the demeanor of decency in the empire. 35 Goldsmith’s Altangi is there not just to critique Englishness and subject himself and China to critique but also to expose ignorant judgments by random interlocutors. The European craze for “furniture, frippery, and fi reworks” of ostensible Chinese origin are supplemented by the author’s “small cargoe of Chinese morality”: philosophical wisdom is the small extra to a largely commodity culture, and indeed a slap in the face to the grandiose ambitions of Enlightenment Orientalism. Even as the wheelbarrow containing these sentiments sinks into the Thames, the editor wakes up having suffered an alarming near-metamorphosis into a performing monkey reminiscent of The Arabian Nights: “I resemble one of those solitary animals that has been forced from its forest to gratify human curiosity. My earliest wish was to escape unheeded through life; but I have been set up for half-pence, to fret and scamper at the end of my chain.” An authorial pathos emerges here, where the economic pressures on the writer of the oriental tale are momentarily made visible even as he is undergoing transformation by his subject matter. By directing ire, contempt, and aggression at Altangi, as well as deflecting some of it back onto Altangi’s interlocutors, Goldsmith deploys not just the usual observer-spy figure inherited from Marana but also the fl ippancy of the cultural agent provocateur, exposing the socioeconomic and professional pressures faced by the occasional Grub Street writer who performed Enlightenment Orientalism as critical cosmopolitanism. 36 As we saw with Montesquieu and Lyttelton, the interpolated tale figures prominently, especially with the narrative of Altangi’s son and his passionate affair with the beautiful slave who turns out to be, rather formalistically, the daughter of the Man in Black. Goldsmith also uses the footnote to telling effect, abandoning fictional extension for the short leash of the editorial put-down. He can capitalize on the vogue for Enlightenment Orientalism even as he can ridicule it and control its effects. Altangi feels infuriated when patronized by a host who pontificates about China and its customs without having traveled there or even knowing the language. In his own defense, the host claims authority for having “written many a sheet of eastern tale myself . . . close to the true manner” (144). 37 Enlightenment Orientalism has become a literary and stylistic exercise that acquires legitimacy by similarity with other narratives rather

100

chapter two

than with its presumed real-world referents, whether Chinese, Persian, or Indian. Fictional discourse trumps real embodiment, and the author as performing monkey becomes a sign of the marketplace. However, is this a badge of Orientalist power or a deflating self-parody that reduces China to chinoiserie? In his notes, Goldsmith deliberately confuses the issue, dismissing some genuinely reported Chinese customs as false and passing off unheard-of customs as real. This approach could speak to a deliberately cultivated irresponsibility toward the cultural referent in the oriental tale, much in the manner of his predecessor Horace Walpole, from whom Goldsmith appears to have taken Altangi’s forename, or of William Beckford, whose Vathek would appear a couple of decades later. Such rhetorical moves become an elaborate detective game for insiders, whereby the knowing reader deciphers “Chinese” elements from hoaxes and disguised British elements. The substitution of any “Oriental” figure for any other is at stake: Altangi complains about his ignorant interlocutors who expect that the Chinese “must express himself in metaphor; swear by Alla, rail against wine, and behave, and talk and write like a Turk or Persian” (142). A genre that ruthlessly undercuts itself may be exhausted, but such a high degree of self-conscious abandon also suggests complete confidence. But then, when a discourse reigns supreme, self-ironization is the sign of internal entrapment rather than stylistic freedom. 38 However, cosmopolitanism is seen as naive idealism, involving peripateia without purposiveness and a defamiliarization of the subject without a subsequent recentering. Despite all its flaws and limitations, Goldsmith does not entirely pooh-pooh cosmopolitanism, which can be seen as tempering the excesses of patriotism with humanitarianism (421). 39 Goldsmith’s neoclassical rage at the hybrid aesthetics of chinoiserie masks the even deeper concern that such forms enabled incipient countercultures, from masquerades to homosexuality.40 After the French Revolution, cosmopolitanism begins to acquire a revolutionary meaning, but such a development retroactively colors many of the oriental tales by French philosophes and their English imitators. Any singling out of Enlightenment—whether Orientalist or otherwise—is, strictly speaking, anachronistic, because these terms allow us to map tendencies that contemporaneous writers could not. Progressivism as a result of Enlightenment Orientalism was not a necessary outcome. As we shall see, a developing set of singularities through cosmopolitan pseudoethnography at the end of the century could also embody a particularly conservative strain that rejected any ingenuous belief in progress. Respect for other cultures was a politically conservative tendency in the eighteenth century, counseling

Oriental Singularity

101

noninterference and equal status, whereas perceptions of European superiority went along with notions of civilizing the uncultivated. Enlightenment could be both anti-imperial and imperial, depending on who was wielding the critical tool.

SATIRICAL LETTERS EAST AND WEST How do historians of colonial literature analyze the singularities that were produced by satire or pseudoethnography and made visible through the genres of Enlightenment Orientalism? Literary production not wedded to a realist and referential framework does not appeal to the socialscientific schema that has dominated the study of colonialism and nationalism. Literature is a place where sentiments can be measured, but once these affects are treated as documentary evidence, they are decoded transitively toward understanding the sensibilities produced by colonial rule. Metropolitan literary production not only contains colonialist intentions proceeding to national cultures and colonial instrumentalities but also provides evidence of the circulation of transcultural perceptions in other spheres such as philosophy, culture, religion, and politics. Literary depictions, sometimes blatantly unreferential, offer critical alternatives that are offered in a number of debates, internal to Britain and France and subsidiary to the fictional and philosophical projects of the writers who produced them. Literary productions thematizing the Orient and other non-European sites are frequently multidirectional and interact with other Enlightenment theorizations of forms of political accountability that are later ignored. But fictionality cannot just be dismissed or discounted or decoded in order to get at the immediate needs of colonizing desires; rather, fictionality is central to the phantasmatic and intersubjective aspects of the colonial relation. The eventual formats of Enlightenment Orientalism are geographically imprecise, and its methods involve cross-comparison via analogy and the blurring of different sites and polities. Through Enlightenment Orientalism, we can see how seemingly teleological investigative modalities can be turned on unanticipated objects, including especially the psychology of the investigating subject. Literature provides a selfreflexive function for subjective reconstitution that can both extend and critique standard forms of investigation. Providing great suppleness in its double-sided critical interrogation of subject and object, a mode such as satire in the colonial context leads to discourses of reform as well as coded political alternatives to the inexorable directionality of colonial domina-

102

chapter two

tion. Furthermore, the philosophical cast of some satirical reflection addresses a range of self-correcting epistemological alternatives, ranging from cross-cultural relativism to moral universalism, comparative religion to dogmatic Christianity, and pseudoethnographic stereotyping to nascent anti-imperialism. Reading forward from Montesquieu, Lyttelton, and Goldsmith, this chapter concludes by examining two lesser-known imitations of the late eighteenth century, one dealing with the South Asian colonial context and the other with the North American one. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is a satirical and pseudoethnographic text that emphasizes the subtlety as well as the difficulty of bringing Enlightenment Orientalism as “application” to a specific cultural context. Hamilton’s text was published in 1796 and went through five editions till 1811, and also had an American printing in 1819. It responds directly to the controversies around the parliamentary impeachment of the fi rst governor-general of British India, Warren Hastings, as well as indirectly to the events of the French Revolution. Taking Hastings’s side in the debate, Hamilton relies on her brother’s 1787 text A Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afghans. Charles, who had initially “qualified himself in translation and country correspondence,” claims to upgrade his text, supposedly based on a found Persian manuscript of an eyewitness account, from translation to historical relation in order to counter the “universal decline of learning in the empire . . . [that] has affected history in particular.” Both brother and sister felt personally beholden to Hastings, dedicating their books to him, even though they also used their knowledge of India to criticize certain aspects of British culture. While it is easy to see the sister as fictionalizing Charles Hamilton’s treatise into a softer form, her contribution does render a complex background, as the epistolary structure of Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is clearly modeled on that of texts such as Montesquieu’s and Goldsmith’s.41 Holding to this pseudoethnographic and satirical format, Hamilton’s fiction involves an exchange of letters between two “Hindoo” rajahs, Za¯a¯rmilla, rajah of Almora, and Kishen Neeay Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra, zimeendar (or landholder) of Cumlore in Rohilkhund. These Indian princelings have been displaced by the battle of Cutterah in the Rohilla War of 1774. In this war East India Company troops helped Shuja-ud-daulah, the nawab of Awadh, to overthrow Hafi z Rhamut, the regent of Rohilkhund. By helping fulfi ll the territorial ambitions of Shuja-ud-daulah, the East India Company was

Oriental Singularity

103

making the nawab into its creature and enhancing the private corruption of its officials, or at least so Hastings’s critics argued. Hamilton wishes to refute such charges by demonstrating the purity of Hastings’s intentions as well as documenting the beneficial effects of Company rule. Za¯a¯rmilla starts off as a mouthpiece for a naive appreciation of the British intervention in the subcontinent. By 1796, when this novel was fi rst published, this is code for the complete vindication of Hastings against Burke, Sheridan, and others who had failed in their almost decade-long impeachment hearings in the British Parliament to convict him on political corruption and misdemeanor charges. As Sara Suleri argues, Burke’s tactics were to scapegoat Hastings for the entirety of the Company’s colonial guilt—effective for the general calumny of a political attack, but not as useful in making the technical and legal charges of the impeachment stick. Some of the most sensationalistic charges against Hastings pertained to the Company’s conduct of the Rohilla War on behalf of the nawab of Awadh against a seemingly peaceful Rohilkhund. Contra Burkean scandal-mongering regarding Hastings, Hamilton’s text depicts his tenure as benevolent and largely advantageous to the Hindu majority population in India. In the very fi rst letter, Za¯a¯rmilla meets Charles Percy, a wounded officer who is “perfect master” of Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani. This idealized Briton’s Orientalist knowledge exceeds that of any Indian native: “His conversation was like the soft dew of the morning, when it falls upon the valley of roses; it at once refreshed and purified the soul. His knowledge, in comparison of that of the most learned among the Pundits of the present age, was like the mountains of Cummow compared to the nest of the ant. The powers of his mind were deep and extensive as the wave of the mighty Ganges. His heart was the seat of virtue, and truth reposed in his bosom” (80). Za¯a¯rmilla is educated by the ailing Percy, who teaches him about human nature in its various forms, “darkened by depravity” in Persia, “degraded by slavery” in Asia, and “milder” in Europe—“whole nations have there acknowledged the rights of human nature” (82). The Romans and Greeks, whom the Persians criticized in India, actually “performed Poojah [prayer] to the Goddess of Liberty” (82). After hearing the story of the appearance of Christianity, Za¯a¯rmilla is “favoured with the perusal of the Christian Shaster,” the Bible. Za¯a¯rmilla fi nds “the precepts it contains” as “simple, pure, and powerful, all addressed to the heart; and calculated for restoring the universal peace and happiness which has been banished from the earth, since the days of the Sottee Jogue [Golden Age]” (83). The

104

chapter two

Christian catechism and British history lesson go on, although with some mild touches of irony, and various singularities of cross-cultural discovery result. According to the Hindoo Rajah, the British desire to teach peoples of the world about liberty “had them send forth colonies to enlighten and instruct the vast regions of America. To disseminate the love of virtue and freedom, they cultivate the trans-Atlantic isles: and to rescue our nation from the hands of the oppressor, did this brave, and generous people visit the shores of Hindoostan!” (84). This conversation is retroactively ironic, supposedly taking place in 1775, the eve of the American Revolution. Further, Percy tells Za¯a¯rmilla that the greatest sign of British civilizational advancement is its treatment of womenfolk, who are educated, and whose souls can go to heaven when they die. Hamilton was aware of texts such as William Alexander’s The History of Women (1779), which argued that the advancement of a civilization depends upon the status of women in that society. This is also the occasion for a resounding condemnation of the practice of sati, or widow sacrifice, which for European observers best exemplified the low status of women in Indian society. Percy dies soon after he gives Za¯a¯rmilla his moral education, but not before convincing him of the superiority of Christianity and the need to adopt an emancipatory attitude toward women. Hamilton’s paean to Percy may sound excessive to our ears, but to some degree its sentimental excesses are colored by the fact that Elizabeth is writing after the death of both her brother and his friend. Therefore, Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra asks Za¯a¯rmilla to listen to the accounts he received from the Brahman Sheermaal, who has visited Britain and observed firsthand the various flaws of British society. Both Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra and Sheermaal defend the institution of sati. The liberal-minded Za¯a¯rmilla rejects Sheermaal’s account as prejudiced and continues to uphold the positive aspects of British colonial presence in India. Za¯a¯rmilla is, nonetheless, warned by a reply from his correspondent and fellow rajah Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra that the British are immoral and hypocritical. Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra, unable to understand British technological advancement in being able to give someone an electric shock or show pictures through a magic lantern, accuses the British of black magic. Meanwhile, the two rajahs marry each other’s sisters, but after a five-year hiatus, Za¯a¯rmilla leaves Almora following the death of his wife, Priyamvada. He is taken through the British territories of influence to Calcutta. The liberal-minded Za¯a¯rmilla is much taken by the cosmopolitan coffeehouses in the British settlement, as well as its gardens, port, and bustling streets with their

Oriental Singularity

105

multicultural populace—a diversity that is new to him.42 Seeing this cosmopolitan multitude as salutary, Za¯a¯rmilla decides to risk losing caste and enlighten himself by visiting England. There, however, the scales begin to fall from his eyes, and he recognizes how presciently correct the Brahmin Sheermaal was when he wrote to Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra years earlier about British failings and hypocrisy.43 The opportunities that arise from Za¯a¯rmilla’s visit occasion many satirical reflections on various aspects of both Indian and British society, especially the status of womanhood, the scientific temper, political corruption, and the absurdities of modern philosophy. Insufficient Christianity is largely the problem in Britain; Gibbon’s paean to Islam in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire can bear no fruit in Britain, as Islam forbids slavery and alcohol and the British public is addicted to the morally reprehensible influences of both. After meeting a whole range of British characters, both sentimentalized sympathetic interlocutors and Theophrastan satirical butts, Za¯a¯rmilla ultimately returns to India a somewhat chastened but still moderate apologist for the benefits that derive from the British presence in India. Elizabeth Hamilton’s “Preliminary Dissertation” on India, which precedes her fiction and justifies her political stance, corresponds to the wide optics of Enlightenment Orientalism as a form of global classical scholarship that I discussed in the introduction. Its main wager is to assimilate newfound knowledge about India into the comparative classicism of the Orientalists, although Indian civilization is divided on gendered religious lines to yield an image of the Hindus as peaceful if effeminate natives who have been conquered by hypermasculine Muslim rulers’ rapacious invasions. Global classicism compares Hindu culture to that of the classical Romans and the Greeks, and also to feudal European culture, while excoriating Islamic culture as overthrowing peaceful Hindu vegetarianism by “the resistless fury of Fanatic zeal” established by “the imposter of Mecca.” Islam, “the same overwhelming torrent, which had inundated the greater part of Africa, burst its way into the very heart of Europe, and covered many kingdoms of Asia with unbounded desolation; directed its baleful course to the flourishing provinces of Hindoostan” (67). The decline of Mughal despotism is followed by the deliverance of the stoical inhabitants by the British intervention, through which “the long-suffering Hindoos . . . experienced a happy change” (70). For the Hamiltons, both brother and sister, this mythically gentle Hindu had a civilizing and moderating effect on the harsh Muslim, and the British presence would further allow the

106

chapter two

flourishing and freedom of the majority. While religious essence constitutes cultural essence in the Hamiltons’ world, it is also possible for the singularity of transculturation to occur.44 In a context where women’s virtue was still largely a mechanism for the transfer of property between men, women writers such as Hamilton emerge to feminize discourses of evangelism, political philosophy, and emerging prose fiction across the political spectrum, even as they enter the brewing argument around the unfolding of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic aftermath. Hamilton appropriates discourses considered to be male bastions—including criticism, satire, and anthropology—and delivers a feminized version of them through her attempt at Enlightenment Orientalism.45 Characterizing Hindu India as full of women and feminized men was typical of travel writings such as William Hodges’s Travels in India.46 Hamilton draws considerably from Hodges as well as from Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities, an early version of speculative comparative classicism that in seven volumes put Hindu beliefs alongside those of Scythian, Persian, Egyptian, and druidical religions. Maurice designated four key texts as crucial for the understanding of India—the Hitopades´a of Narayana (the Fables of Pilpay discussed in chapter 3), Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, the Bhagavad Gita, and Manu’s Code of Hindu Laws—thereby initiating British Orientalists’ decipherment of Indian culture according to the doctrines enshrined in the texts. Hamilton appears to follow this advice, as she systematically alludes to these texts. For instance, Maurice’s volume 6 is entirely devoted to an account of the “origin of druids and the ancient commerce of Hindostan.” Maurice sees the Mahabharata as a corruption of ancient Chaldean history and compares the war between the suras and the asuras to the gigantomachy of the giants and the Titans in Greek mythology. The Buddha is compared to the Hermes or Mercury of the West and the Woden of the Northern World. Elizabeth Hamilton’s preliminary dissertation, like the writings of William Jones and other Orientalists, is replete with such analogies. Hamilton was closely conversant with Jones’s various hymns to Hindu deities written in the form of Pindaric odes, with preliminary arguments and explanatory footnotes to help unfamiliar readers. Hamilton sees the sun god Surya as the Apollo of the Hindus, Lakshmi or Sree as the Hindu Ceres, Kartikeya as Mars, Saraswati as Minerva Musica, and Ganesa as Janus (this last being an especially mistaken identification). She pays special attention to Kama, the Indian Cupid with his sugarcane bow; the entire text of Jones’s “A Hymn to Camdeo” (1784) is included in the fi rst edition of her book. Jones had erroneously speculated

Oriental Singularity

107

that one of Kama’s synonyms, Deepaka, was a boustrophedonic inversion of the Latin “Cupid,” that is, “Dipuc.” Maurice’s audience was similarly informed about the likely Indian origin of Pythagorean ideas regarding the transmigration of the soul, as well as phallic worship in Europe, Egypt, and India and ideas about generative and creative power through religion.47 A transatlantic example of South Asian pseudoethnography, a text of less complexity than Hamilton’s that similarly imitates Marana and Montesquieu, is Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, or Letters Written By a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America (Philadelphia, 1787). While this is by now a largely forgotten text, as is Hamilton’s, it is a sobering reminder that the 1787 meeting of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia was partly spurred by the challenge posed to American commercial shipping by the Barbary pirates. Indeed, the charter for the constitution of the US Navy in 1794 cites as a principle the need to protect US commercial interests from Algerian rovers. In Markoe’s fiction the main letter writer, Mehemet, an Algerian Muslim, states ironically that “a Pennsylvanian was less known to the world than a Greenlander or a Chinese” (70). Mehemet, modeled on Marana’s Mahmut in The Turkish Spy, wishes to capitalize on Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and Rhode Island’s resistance to the federal constitution in favor of his paymasters’ interests: “Ever attentive to the welfare and glory of my country, I have revolved in my mind the means of rendering this very probable revolt [in Massachusetts and Rhode Island] beneficial to Algiers, and glorious to the Sublime Porte, by establishing an Ottoman Malta [sic, as Malta was never Ottoman] on the coasts of America” (104). By the end of the novel, however, Mehemet has decided to abandon his native country and embrace Pennsylvania’s promise of “FREEDOM and CHRISTIANITY.”48 While following the lead of the Orientalists such as Jones, Halhed, Wilkins, and Maurice, writers such as Peter Markoe and Elizabeth Hamilton make their Algerian and Hindu observers turn their investigative sights onto the United States and Britain, respectively. As late practitioners of Enlightenment Orientalism, Mehemet and Za¯a¯rmilla read America and Britain the way Mahmut read Europe for the Ottomans in The Turkish Spy. Za¯a¯rmilla reads Britain according to the protocols of the Bible, with frequently comic results, even as Britain’s professional scholars were idealizing India on the basis of texts such as those highlighted by Maurice. Mehemet reads Pennsylvania hilariously according to stereotypes of Ottoman protocols. At the same time, Hindu and Islamic terms are used to describe and defamiliarize fetishistic British and American activities.

108

chapter two

For instance, Hamilton satirizes the English predilection for card playing, as Lyttelton did. In an early letter from Sheermaal to Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra, the reference is to Hindu devotion: The object of their most serious devotion was strictly analogous to the symbols of our Dewtah [Deity], not indeed cut in the solid rock of gloomy caverns; nor hewn on the walls of sacred temples; but, correspondent to the trifl ing genius of these silly people, painted upon small slips of stiff paper. . . . It is not necessary that those devotees should perform the seven ablutions; neither do they rub their bodies with earth; neither do they cover their heads with cow-dung: and, instead of solemn prostration before these painted objects of their idolatry, they take them familiarly into their hands, and toss them one after another upon a table covered with green cloth; turn them up and down, sometimes gazing upon them with momentary admiration, as they lie prostrate on the middle of the table; then again, seizing them with holy ardour, they turn them hastily upon their faces. And to this Poojah of idols, termed CARDS, do the major part of the people devote their time; sacrificing every enjoyment of life, as well as every domestic duty to the performance of this singular devotion. (114–15)

Sheermaal is able to move deftly from the fetishism involved in card games to the gaming laws. His traveling companion is hauled up before the Justice of the Peace as a poacher after he accidentally shoots and kills several partridges while examining a peasant’s gun. The inflated criminal proceedings convince Sheermaal that just as Zoroastrians in Persia worship the sun and people in other parts of the world adore the crocodile, the jackal, or the monkey, and as Hindus sacralize the cow, so do the British revere partridges.49 In similarly hilarious fashion, Markoe’s Mehemet describes the Pennsylvanian constitution with supposed Oriental similes. The Pennsylvanian constitution resembles many things: a loaded wagon, a pair of scales, a football to be kicked around, a piece of beef on a spit to be roasted, a hen’s egg, and a wheelbarrow to carry everyone’s stuff around in (Letter XIV). While Hamilton and Markoe perform this reverse ethnography that Enlightenment Orientalism is especially famous for since Marana’s L’espion turc and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, they also occasionally satirize Orientalist predilections toward hypothesizing common origins. For instance, Hamilton’s Sheermaal notes that the mode of living among the poor English folk, “in which animal food is scarcely known, is another

Oriental Singularity

109

argument in favour of their Hindoo origin.”50 Markoe’s Mehemet elevates Carthage’s commercial success over Rome’s imperial ambitions, parlaying his North African identity against British militarism. Despite the presence of a great number of cultural particularities in Hamilton’s pseudoethnographic text, she is clearly taking aim at those (including her mentor Hastings) who argued for cultural relativism or “geographical morality” in evaluating accepted practices and traditions in India, a position that was attacked resoundingly in the impeachment trials. Meanwhile, Burke could preach universalism while paternalistically representing Hastings’s pathetic victims in his overblown, sensationalist rhetoric.51 Hamilton satirizes Burke as a coffeehouse orator who attempts to befriend Za¯a¯rmilla, seeing him as an Indian victim. However, the Burke figure hopes to convince Za¯a¯rmilla that “we [the British] are not a nation of monsters” (244). The parodic “Burke” refuses to let Za¯a¯rmilla speak and constantly speaks for him, at him, and through him regarding the supposedly violent activities of the East India Company. He apologizes, berates, melodramatizes, and excoriates, but most important, he eventually departs without allowing Za¯a¯rmilla to utter a word throughout his speechifying. A relieved Za¯a¯rmilla confesses that he thinks the orator to be insane, and “exceedingly rejoiced at his departure, and that he had done no mischief to himself or others, during this paroxysm of delirium” (245). Similarly, by placing a fictional Algerian Muslim in the territory of the new republic, Markoe suggests the need for a bilateral cultural evaluation at a time of heightened tension between the United States and North Africa. In his fascinating account of the Hastings impeachment, Nicholas Dirks argues that even while the spectacular drama of the trial focused on the scandalous activities of empire and company corruption, it functioned to normalize empire under parliamentary oversight and rule of law. Burke might be read as an anti-imperialist because he brought the Company to book before Parliament, but he was actually hastening the eventual replacement of mercantile colonialism by political imperialism. Dirks shows that the trials themselves became yet another ideological displacement, rationalizing private activities and economic corruption and focusing all the demonization onto one man, Hastings, while failing to pursue the implications of imperial ambition as a sustained and social whole. We might argue that Enlightenment Orientalism led to the elaboration of a speculative genre through Hamilton’s intervention. Even while defending Hastings, Hamilton makes visible some other possibilities, including autocritique, and suspends certain kinds of colonial teleology despite the biases and judgments that such suspension reflects.52

110

chapter two

Hamilton’s model for the efficacy of literature is likely derived from Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism, a treatise that she read secretly as a child to avoid censure, as criticism was understood to be a specifically masculine preoccupation. In that work, Kames argues in favor of fiction as making possible an “ideal presence” that allows readers to see fictional objects in their mind’s eye. To quote from Henry Home, Lord Kames, “even genuine history has no command over our passions but by ideal presence only; and therefore . . . with respect to the moving our passions, genuine history stands upon the same footing with fable.”53 In fact, Kames goes on to argue that prose fiction, painting, and theatrical performance, in ascending order, are all the more successful than plain history because of the “vivacity of ideas” they raise. This ideal presence (which Kames also describes as “a waking dream,” “intuition,” or “reflective remembrance”) is characterized as halfway between “real presence” and “superficial remembrance.” Fictionality, or in a larger sense, the suspended reality of various representational logics, is neither reality nor memory but something like detailed visualization, scientific thought-experiment, or witnessed reenactment.54 This position is an early instance that suggests a performative theory of fiction, but not necessarily only through ideas of sensory immersion or greater forms of realism. It is the reflexive function of all such media, whether fiction, visual representation, or theatrical performance, to provide immersion and then bounce-back rumination leading to greater learning.55 In many ways, if Enlightenment Orientalism is to gain any serious purchase on its purported object—whether as satire, travelogue, or romance— it has to be considered in relation to this kind of Kamesian hypothesis. What would it be like if a particular person, steeped in specific cultural prejudices, were immersed in a totally different environment? Defamiliarization will yield anthropological and ethnographic insights that only fresh eyes can see, but at the same time, these insights will reflect the prejudices of the viewing person. From that self-reflexivity, subject and object can be caught up in a new dynamic that is the wager of the satirical function of Enlightenment Orientalism and the comparative critical method it fosters. At their best, such comparative representations go beyond the stereotype and put forward a radical epistemological skepticism of everything, including their own status. My goal is not to defend every angle of Enlightenment Orientalism that can be discovered in texts such as Montesquieu’s, Hamilton’s, and Markoe’s which are so clearly marked by their historical moments, but to focus on how they create the possibility of an interactive and self-reflexive

Oriental Singularity

111

critique of already solidified positions and sedimented ideologies. What such texts do is take up the scandal of empire, both its incipient development and its consequential aftermath, through genres that allow for a philosophical reflection on the very protocols of cross-cultural judgment. In this sense, Enlightenment Orientalism is an investigative tool that offers an alternative to the uniform directionality of other fictional genres, including especially the nation-centered novel after the middle of the eighteenth century.

Pa r t I I

Transcultural Allegories

chapter three

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations: Fontenelle, Bidpai, Swift, Voltaire

. . . the Supreme Being . . . has created millions of worlds none of which resemble any other . . . —Jesrad, in Voltaire’s Zadig (1747)

S

peculation about other worlds—rather than just about other polities— has existed since ancient times, spawning an extensive literature. For the Greeks, this speculation was not so much about earthlike bodies as about cosmic systems (kosmoi). To a large extent, the early debates around this topic were closed ones, being the exclusive concern of philosophers and theologians. The pre-Socratics, from Democritus to Metrodorus of Chios, had speculated about other worlds. Within that lineage, Anaximander theorized a boundless universe, while Lucretius speculated that planets and stars were inhabited; Plato expounded the theory of the archetype and the allegory of the cave, and Aristotle promulgated an unchanging, eternal, and fi nite world; and if Pythagoras proclaimed the moon was earthlike, Plutarch explicated why there was an apparent face in the orb of the moon. Augustine and other early church fathers rejected all these speculations categorically, as they implied that God did not have an earthbound focus. Ptolemaic astronomy, resolutely geocentric, was institutionalized within Catholic theology. The cosmos was deemed to be composed of eight perfect spheres—the sun, the moon, the five known planets, and the shell of the universe, which contained the seven wandering stars along with the fi xed zodiac—all to be viewed from the flat earth below. Any cosmogony—or physical model of the universe—was potentially heretical if it threatened to alter the received cosmology pertaining to the special role of sin, grace, and redemption within the Christian life. 115

116

chapter three

The advent of a scientific culture with the astronomical discoveries of the Renaissance, and especially Copernicus’s heliocentric theory in his De revolutionibus (1543), began to disseminate these newer cosmogonies to a wider audience. Tycho, Kepler, Bruno, Galileo, and Campanella had to combat censorship and ostracism as they explained the need to accept Copernicus’s heliocentrism and its corollary: the existence of countless solar systems beyond our own.1 The Copernican cosmogony subverted many aspects of received Christian cosmology. It was not just a simple matter of correcting one grand error, where heliocentrism could be substituted for geocentrism. When Copernicus expanded the eighth sphere infi nitely, other verities came tumbling down. The stars were no longer fi xed points on the surface of this eighth sphere but suns in their own right. Would each of them then have its own solar system? If the earth was just one planet among others, it lost its exceptional status for Christians as God’s special project. Anthropocentrism and ethnocentrisms were immediately under pressure. If the earth was a planet, could not other planets, whether belonging to this solar system or others, be so many alternative earths? If other planets could sustain life, were there human beings that lived there, or bizarre creatures with unknown biologies and ontologies? If the habitation on other planets was indeed human, were those civilizations also subject to the Christian doctrines of original sin and divine redemption? Lastly, could there be interplanetary voyages to ascertain whether such speculations were justified? This alternative strain of the theory of multiple worlds needs to be thought through alongside the fictions of Enlightenment Orientalism that we have been considering thus far. Of course, there were many literary works that had already imagined traveling there and back. The imaginary voyage was an ancient genre, exemplified in Homer’s Odyssey, Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun, and Euhemerus’s Sacred History. Lucian’s True History already parodies this genre’s pious speculations and its ability to generate wonder and surprise with little narrative effort and no actual content, whether by historians such as Ctesias and Herodotus or epic poets such as Homer. Taken to the moon by a giant waterspout, Lucian’s travelers fi nd that the fanciful creatures who live there, whether mushroom-men, acorn-dogs, or cloud-centaurs, are unfortunately conscripted into an all-out war between the territories of the moon and those of the sun. Renaissance fictions such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623), Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627), and François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) projected fabulous characters traveling to other lands if

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

117

only in order to better understand the limitations of the writer’s own society. Fantastic travels had acquired their own political and philosophical spin making them vehicles of reflection. The moon, discovered to be the earth’s satellite, was the most obvious target of speculations concerning habitability, all the way back to Lucian or Plutarch. Where philosophy stumbled, fiction stepped into the breach and set philosophy new challenges. As one of the most popular fictional subgenres of the seventeenth century, the lunar voyage contributed to the cosmological speculative frenzy. Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), John Wilkins’ The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique contenant les États et Empires de la lune (1657), Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666), Nolant de Fatouville’s Arlequin, empereur de la lune (1684), Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Christiaan Huygens’s Cosmotheoros (1698), and Samuel Brunt’s A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) exemplified vicarious science fiction and utopian political satire all at once. Wilkins and Cavendish use the term world to mark the semantic change from classical times, as a world was not necessarily another universe but another earth or its equivalent.2 The conceptual separation of world from universe only multiplied the stakes. If the entire universe was composed of one substance, and nature abhorred a vacuum as declared by Aristotle, what was the best explanation for the vast distances between heavenly bodies? If the universe was a plenum, as Aristotle and later Descartes deduced, the space intervening between planets and stars was thought to contain a very subtle kind of matter that kept bodies within their orbits. Descartes suggested that the mechanics of order was maintained by the flow of highly charged vortices (tourbillons) around cosmic objects, multiplied by infi nite planes that kept bodies from colliding with each other. Even though Newton’s Principia Mathematica promulgating the theory of gravity was published in 1687, it would take another half-century until Newtonian mechanics could fully replace Cartesian vorticism with an explanation of action-at-a-distance and the positing of large vacuums that separated cosmic bodies. When fi rst proposed, the principle of gravity appeared mystical, in contrast with Cartesian materialism. Once the universe no longer required an ontology centered on plenitude, the last vestiges of the Aristotelian cosmogony that had survived within Cartesian science would be eliminated. 3 If a planetary world was a level down from the cosmic world, an unknown continental world functioned analogically as a further step down in magnitude, especially since the European discovery of the Americas

118

chapter three

and the ensuing cultural encounter, which was almost akin to an interplanetary voyage with respect to the role it played, and continues to play, in the global imagination. Gabriel de Foigny’s imaginary voyage to La Terre australe connue (1676) stoked a hankering for the putative great southern continent that continued until Cook’s and Bougainville’s voyages many years later. Henry Nevile’s The Isle of Pines (1668) and Denis Vairasse d’Allais’s Histoire des Sévarambes (1677–79) fantasized the existence of polygamous social organization elsewhere, and Foigny’s Australia was imaginatively peopled by a race of hermaphrodites. The tendency to transpose polygenesis onto continental separation was not untypical. The four sections of this chapter interconnect three kinds of transcultural fictions—interplanetary, intercultural, and interspecies—all of which signal the generic experimentation of an Enlightenment Orientalism that looks beyond national realism and identity politics. The overarching theme of cosmological realism continues in the fi rst section through an analysis of Bernard le Bouyer Fontenelle’s elaboration of a plural-worlds hypothesis that accommodates both cultural relativism and Enlightenment science. The second section approaches the impact of interspecies fiction by discussing the impact of the Fables of Bidpai, a wide-ranging collection of Eastern beast fables that had circulated in Europe since the Middle Ages. Cosmological realism interrogates anthropocentrism from the skies, while anthropomorphic stories about animals inject relativism from the ground up. The third section demonstrates how Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels employs both cosmological realism and beast fable to defamiliarize cultural identity politics. The fi nal section demonstrates how Voltaire followed these earlier examples with versatile antirealist fables that explore transcultural alternatives toward satirical insights. Enlightenment Orientalism is most effective as a mode by enabling the play between singularity and applicability. Incommensurability and universality can be contemplated simultaneously.

INTERPLANETARY REFLECTIONS Within this rich context of speculations on the plurality of undiscovered worlds—whether continents or planets—Fontenelle published Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), inaugurating a new genre of science explained through witty conversation. Aristocratic préciosité inflected the scientific dialogue’s crypto-Orientalist signification. Staged between a philosopher and a marchioness over successive evenings, Fontenelle’s Entretiens also mixed fiction with nonfiction, asking that the ladies fol-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

119

low along just as if they were reading Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves.4 Published a few decades after Pierre Borel’s Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes (1657), Entretiens was a runaway success, with dozens of editions in French, English, and German all the way through to 1809.5 Despite their Cartesian and Epicurean (rather than Newtonian) cosmogony, Fontenelle’s witty dialogues became a vehicle for the dissemination of the new philosophy.6 It is no idle turn of phrase when Michel Foucault refers to the literary elucidation of science and the close ties between talking, explaining, and knowing as l’astronomie fontenellisée.7 Fontenellized astronomy proceeded on a parallel track to Enlightenment Orientalist pseudoethnography. As a refi ned exponent of the préciosité then dominant in literary circles, Fontenelle aims to explain science to the elite rather than the general public. Treating philosophy unphilosophically, he ennobles science through figurative and poetic language. In a sixth dialogue added to the 1687 edition, the philosopher reassures the marchioness as belonging to a select group that will not divulge scientific secrets to the general public (160). Fontenelle creates the stargazing philosophe out of the seventeenth-century tradition of the honnête homme, traversing heavenly boundaries as a contemporary of Marana’s bordercrossing spy, Mahmut.8 Fontenelle’s light tone does not make his objectives shallow. As Montesquieu wrote later in appreciation of the Entretiens, no doubt partly justifying his own bantering tone in Lettres persanes, “A work’s usefulness ought not to be judged according to the style that the author has chosen. Often, we make puerile remarks in grave tones, and just as often, we utter very serious truths banteringly.”9 This underscores the lineage of Montesquieu’s Enlightenment Orientalism, beholden to Fontenellian skepticist cosmology just as much as to Marana’s reverse ethnocentrism. Fontenelle would rise to the powerful position of perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences in 1697, redacting scientific knowledge through annual reports that he authored until his retirement in 1740. This made him the gatekeeper for all scientific knowledge in France for almost half a century, and his official signature approved the licensing of Galland’s Mille et une nuits.10 Aestheticizing, eroticizing, and fictionalizing scientific endeavor, Fontenelle’s Entretiens emphasized heuristic spectacle. The philosophe is expositor and the marchioness a willing spectator and pupil. The philosopher’s scientific bantering matches the pseudoethnographic conjectures of Marana and Montesquieu.11 Conducted over several evenings, the fi rst dialogue starts with a nocturnal proposition both scientific and libertine. The marchioness com-

120

chapter three

pares the day to the brilliance of a beautiful blonde and the night to the moving beauty of a brunette. The philosopher concurs, adding that nights are better for dreaming, solitary speculation, romantic longing, and pleasurable speculative ferment (“un certain désordre de pensées où l’on ne tombe point sans plaisir”; 59–61). Nightfall suggests speculation about undiscovered worlds that connect the subjective to the cosmic.12 Viewed nocturnally, Nature turns into a grand spectacle resembling the stage machinery of the Paris Opera. The philosopher-scientist’s role is to come up with an accurate explanation of how the stage machinery works, even though the wheels and counterweights that enable the mobilization of the cosmic scenery remain invisible (see fig. 3.1). While astronomy had humble Eastern origins—knowledge from the East is by now a familiar Renaissance Orientalism trope—deriving from the bucolic pursuits of Chaldean shepherds observing the night sky while tending to their flocks, the philosopher reemphasizes cosmological speculation as the selective— even operatic—pursuit of the upper classes.13 Astronomy is described as the daughter of leisure (l’oisiveté), whereas geometry is the daughter of interest—having been invented in Egypt to measure land claims after the annual Nilotic inundation swept away boundary markers. Poetry, on the other hand, is the daughter of love—a statement that brings it closer to the pursuit of astronomy and reinforces the philosopher’s libertine seduction of his interlocutor (66). “Leisure” and “love” are coded references to the aristocratic life, in contrast to bourgeois “interest.” The conception of science is freed from instrumentalities and focused on opening up new possibilities within the reposeful interlocutor’s mind. Contemplation of other worlds is a heady task, making the speculator prone to unfettered obsession (folie; 61). A conversation with an interlocutor can moderate this solipsism, bringing both pleasure and rationality. The philosopher needs the marchioness as much as she needs him; while he informs her from a position of academic superiority, she tempers his obsessions with a cultivated sensibility. Bantering with her instructor, the marchioness declares that his philosophy is a Dutch auction, lowering the price to garner the quickest possible bid. Nature’s efficient logic suggests magnificent design with economic execution. While the fi rst evening is devoted to the earth’s rotation and revolution, the next four evenings deal with the plurality of worlds. Fontenelle’s philosopher makes the marchioness’s favorite retort into a principle of investigative virtue: “why not?” (111–12). The possible could be probable unless directly falsifiable, an approach to reality by via negativa, very different from sociological forms of realism. The remote can be true, overturning

Figure 3.1. Frontispiece to Fontenelle, A Plurality of Worlds (London: Printed for R. W. and sold by Tho. Osbourne, 1702). Image courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

122

chapter three

existing conventions and introducing elements hitherto ignored. The social effect of a plurality of worlds is relativist and reciprocal. As Fontenelle’s philosopher observes, a lunar eclipse visible on earth affects its viewers no differently from the earth’s being eclipsed when viewed from the moon; if there were moon dwellers seeing the earth eclipsed, they would suffer the same consternation as superstitious Hindus confronted with a lunar eclipse.14 The cross-cultural observations of Marana’s Mahmut seem to be lurking in these pages. Recognizing the self in the other is the best attitude when contemplating unknown beings, “as there are a prodigious number of men who have been, and continue to be mad enough to worship the moon, there must be people on the moon who also worship the earth, and we are therefore mutually on our knees before each other” (89). Despite the commonality, would these moon dwellers count as human, given how much appearance already changes between Europe and China, leading to “other faces, other shapes, other customs, and very different principles of rationality” (93)? Whoever they are, there is no cause to fear hypothetical extraterrestrials, any more than Fontenelle’s society feared the yet undiscovered inhabitants of the Terra Australis Incognita. On the contrary, the philosopher wagers that one day there will be traffic between the earth and the moon. Did Americans and Europeans have any inkling of each other’s existence until their mutual discovery? Curiosity fuels discovery and overturns unexamined prejudices. Philosophical failure is based on just two things: lack of curiosity and poor eyesight.15 Science and anthropology—empirical objectivism and sociocultural analysis—are integrated in these speculations, for which conjecture is crucial. Fontenelle’s speculative cosmological realism mixes the true and the false in a manner that inverts Huet’s idea of a narrative fiction (“Romance”) as “something that might have but has not occurred.”16 The existence of other worlds is conjectural and cannot be verified except by rational deduction and scrupulous open-mindedness. Unable to rely on the consolation of religious truth, which no longer provides plausible explanations for cosmic immensity, the spectator is thrown into a profane world where she has to reason by analogy while figuring out her own bodily presence within the vastness of the universe. The study of fiction—whether the psychological realism of Princess of Clèves or the flying horses of Orlando Furioso—emerges as a useful via media for speculative reasoning. The philosopher’s provocations do not always convince the marchioness. He has to promote the power of conjecture as a methodological innovation. Rather than feeling consternation at the existence of possible

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

123

worlds, the marchioness should abandon herself to reverie. Curious moon dwellers might be able to navigate the exterior surface of our atmosphere and fish for us. Would the marchioness be pleased by such a development? Swallowing the bait in more senses than one, the marchioness is driven by exoticist curiosity: “Why not? she replied, laughing. As for me, I will voluntarily put myself in their nets, just to have the pleasure of seeing those who would have fished for me” (105). Hostilities and hospitalities may occur between the two worlds, and aggression might be converted into seduction. Imaginary encounters lead to a cosmological relativism, even as the projection of similitudes throughout the dialogues suggests that there may be a common basis for differentiation. If lunar inhabitants are inconvenienced by the heat of a perpetual lunar day, they might be living in an extensive underground city like that of subterranean Rome (109). Slowly assimilated into a conjectural cosmogony, the marchioness begins to amuse herself: “It would be no ordinary pleasure to see many different worlds” (109–10). Just like the Hajj to Mecca, a lunar pilgrimage would allow one to contemplate the real significance of the earth. Cosmogonic speculation requires reversibility if perspectival positions are to be comprehended (111). Furthermore, the fecundity of Nature when seen through a microscope means that other worlds will likely be teeming with life.17 The question that comes up for the marchioness is not dissimilar to the questions concerning desire, intentionality, and xenophilia that have come up in relation to whether fiction writers want to imagine remote locations or populate the familiar. Scientific and cosmogonic conjectures favor the faraway over the proximate, but issues of character, social motivation, and ethno-cultural truth nonetheless need to be addressed. Analogy, as Fontenelle’s most favored tool of reasoning, makes the interplanetary a version of the intercultural. Just as individual Africans or Tartars resemble their national models and not Europeans, earthlings “are only a little family in the universe with common facial resemblances; on another planet, there will be another family with a different facial cast” (114–15). Furthermore, language might vary radically; some places value experience and others novelty; some cultures fi xate on the future while others fetishize the past; yet others are bothered by neither, making them the happiest of all. As the speculations about extraterrestrials increase, anthropomorphic projections onto their nature and behavior become inevitable. Humoral and climactic theories of determination are aired in Entretiens as a loose explanatory framework, and racializing stereotypes begin to emerge with a vengeance. Because of their proximity to the sun, the marchioness imag-

124

chapter three

ines, Venusians must be “like Moors from Granada, a small dark people, sunburnt, fiery, and witty, always romantic, composing poetry, liking music, organizing parties, dances, and sporting events every day” (122). The philosopher, more disparaging, depicts Mercurians as “lacking in memory like most Negroes, and [they] never think about anything unless it leads to adventure, by sudden movements” (123). Mercury is likely to contain many insane asylums to accommodate the heat-induced craziness of its inhabitants.18 In contrast to the liveliness of the Mercurians, the marchioness wonders, could Saturnians be wise? The philosopher pronounces them to be slow, phlegmatic, and foolish, given their frigid environment. Saturnians would never laugh, and they would require a full day to answer the most elementary question. Even the Stoic Cato, known to the Romans for his serious demeanor, would be seen as frolicsome in comparison to denizens of Saturn. Reflecting on the faraway, the marchioness comes to a renewed appreciation of her world. Earthlings are varied, including phlegmatic as well as mercurial personalities (138). The philosopher agrees that the earth is a bizarre assemblage, with inhabitants seemingly picked up from many different worlds: “On this account, it is very convenient to be here, as we can see all other worlds in summary [en abrégé]” (138).19 Despite this reterritorialization, the new cosmogony has disoriented the marchioness, who feels lost in her expanded horizons: she is confused and troubled, even terrified. Cross-cultural knowledge unmoors the fi xity of the marchioness’s identity. The philosopher, on the other hand, feels less claustrophobic now that he can lazily appreciate the magnificence of the universe. He counsels his interlocutor to imagine traveling the universe on a comet for a lesson on scalar perspective (150, 157), an idea that Voltaire would later take up. Vorticism suggests instability but is no longer disconcerting once it is sexualized. The marchioness abandons herself to the contemplation of these energies: “Go ahead and make me mad; I will throw caution to the winds [je ne me ménage plus]; I don’t have any more grasp of philosophy; let us stop talking of the world; and let us give ourselves up to the vortices [tourbillons]” (128). The universe consists of elastic force fields throbbing as they rub against each other. The marchioness and the philosopher thereby inscribe themselves and their bodily desires into the new epistemologies. Embodiment is the asymptotic limit of cosmological speculation, as no account of the universe can completely free itself of the observer’s corporeal location, or the animal organs of sense perception that relay empirical information. Sexual vocabulary emphasizes the principle of attraction that characterizes epistemological curiosity. The mar-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

125

chioness decenters scientific rationality through the feminine, as Michel Delon argues.20 Or does the philosopher cynically indulge his pedagogical desire for domination through seduction? The feminine resists, posing a theoretical blockage to the inexorable forward motion of the philosopher’s logic (as we will see repeatedly in later texts by Prévost, Crébillon, and Diderot discussed in chapter 4), but perhaps this femininity—while externally projected onto the marchioness—is just as much a tendency within the philosopher’s personality. Plurality, mobility, relationality, reversibility, diversity, instability, and complementarity characterize this highly sexualized universe, and the contemplation of dynamism is the highest form of pleasure for all observers.21 At the end of the fi fth evening, when the marchioness thanks him for having enlightened her regarding the order of the heavens, the philosopher can conclude with a quip: “I ask you, as sole recompense for my labors, to never see the sun, the sky, or the stars without reflecting as well upon me” (157). Science is the language not just of deduction and induction but also of seduction. The same will hold in the case of libertine Orientalism and social-scientific insight. The dialogue of the sixth evening was added by Fontenelle a year later, reflecting on an analogy between the established verisimilitude of past history and the shaky verisimilitude of cosmogonic conjecture. The edges of history are already conjectural, varying from possible to probable to strictly verifiable. Cosmology is not very different, except proceeding in the opposite direction. Just as fables could be euhemeristic accounts of geological and historical pasts, cosmogonic knowledge has to be gathered from a number of vantage points, including the Chinese annals conveyed to Europe by the Jesuits. Scientific knowledge can expand into polite society, thanks to the curiosity of people like the marchioness (172–73). The marchioness has learned the epistemological advantage of standpoint realism as well as conjectural intervention. Enlightenment Orientalism will rely on both these tendencies, leaning more heavily on conjectural intervention, while the realist novel will overemphasize point-of-view realism anchored in credible national selves. Along with the critique of anthropocentrism, the combination of universalist conjecture and relativist defamiliarization has created an adventurous imperative from the very fi rst evening of the dialogues: “Have not I heard of a certain Philosopher, who being shipwreck’d, and cast upon an unknown Island; who seeing some Mathematical Propositions drawn on the Sea-sands, called to one of those with him, and cry’d Courage, my Friend, here are the Footsteps of Men; this Country is Inhabited?” (73). From being able to imagine that the moon is inhabited, the observer can move to imagining inhabited planets

126

chapter three

and then other solar systems, while beginning to reinterpret civilizational complexities. What Marana does for the East, Fontenelle does in parallel, starting with the universe and working his way down to cross-cultural comparison. The same year as Entretiens Fontenelle published Histoire des oracles, in which he demystified pagan beliefs, but he was widely assumed to be vicariously attacking the veracity of Christian miracles while pretending to attack Christianity’s rivals. The same year also saw the publication of the anonymous Relation de l’île de Bornéo, which heaped scorn on centers of religious belief such as Rome, Geneva, and Jerusalem. Other texts associated with Fontenelle’s perspective, such as De l’origine des fables (1724) and Histoire des Ajaoiens (1682), also radically questioned religion from a comparative perspective portraying skepticism and atheism. Eventually, this principle would reach its grand culmination with Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde (1723–43), discussed in chapter 4. While Marana chose the travel letter, Fontenelle favored the open-endedness of conversational dialogue for Enlightenment interrogation.22 Both forms allow great flexibility and innovation, airing perspectives in such a way as to imply even-handed satirical denunciation of irrationality wherever it might be found. Mechanisms of comparison, begun in rudimentary fashion by these early Enlightenment Orientalists, would become highly complex in the work of a system builder, as with Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748). Fontenelle and his contemporary Marana commenced the trend toward relativist pseudoethnography using Orientalist foils. A critical method was born in préciosité, revealing parallel discourses of natural science and fictional pseudoethnography converging around the method of conjecture as not just desultory fantasy but controlled thought-experiment. Cosmological realism was counterintuitive, persuading human beings to believe that the earth revolved around the sun even though experience taught otherwise. Scientific realism is based on new knowledge and often asks for humanity to abolish its beliefs as the sum of past prejudices. Just as the invention of the microscope allowed early modern scientists to prove the existence of microorganisms that had hitherto been invisible to the naked eye, cosmological realism often controverted expectations concerning reality through both scientific universalism and geographical relativism. As Fontenelle analogizes, we are as ignorant of the putative residents of Venus as the Moors of Granada were about the inhabitants of Lapland. Ultimately, a cosmological realism of Fontenelle’s type is very dif-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

127

ferent from the narrow national realism that reifies familiar objects and dispositions. Cosmological realism is a dialectic between the known and the larger sphere of the unknown, whereby conjectures regarding the unknown revise and overturn the already known. The existence of lunar voyages, oriental tales, or conjectural fictions concerning the faraway, even if they involve blatant fantasy (such as the flying horses of Orlando Furioso), suggest that there might be a correspondence between the earth and the moon, especially if human beings could learn the art of flying (singularly unrealistic for the Enlightenment but a matter of course for us today). Cosmological realism is often counterintuitive by being crucially related to the fantastical that can become real. However, by opposing unexamined prejudices, it subjects familiar assumptions to the rigors of interrogation and defamiliarization. Fontenellian wisdom was like the Galilean, in that it used science to document universalism amidst multiplicity. Aphra Behn produced an early translation of Fontenelle’s tract, publishing A Discovery of New Worlds (1688), a text that orients us toward reflections on the text’s fictional elements within its appended “Essay on Translated Prose.”23 Amongst her last works, Behn’s translation of Fontenelle was published in 1688, the same year as Oroonoko. Fontenelle’s speculation on the plurality of worlds evokes an English translation that mediates universalism and relativism and focuses on the gender dynamics of scientific knowledge.24 Behn is drawn to the text from female empathy, because it features a woman as the philosopher’s interlocutor, but at the same time, she is rather scathing about the weakness of the scientific explanation and the inconsistent character of the marchioness, who is made to “say a great many very silly things, tho’ sometimes she makes Observations so learned, that the greatest Philosophers in Europe could make no better.” Behn wonders if Fontenelle has failed in his objective by forcing “his wild Notion of the Plurality of Worlds to that heighth of Extravagancy, that he most certainly will confound those Readers, who have not Judgment and Wit to distinguish between what is truly solid (or, at least, probable) and what is trifling and airy.” All the same, the Bible cannot be the source of literal truth or scientific deduction. Alternating between feminine self-deprecation with respect to her comprehension of the science and English rationality in relation to French fashionableness, Behn wishes to give Fontenelle a hearing even as she moderates his fanciful excesses. If the Frenchman had only “let alone his learned Men, Philosophical Transactions, and Telescopes in the Planet Jupiter, and his Inhabitants not only there, but in all the fi xed Stars, and even in the Milky-Way, and only stuck to the greatness of the Universe, he had deserved much more

128

chapter three

Praise.” She is impatient with the speculation concerning extraterrestrials, perhaps not appreciating Fontenelle’s cross-cultural motivation. Behn suggests a revisionary approach that separates science from religion: “We live in an Age, wherein many believe nothing contained in that holy Book, others turn it into Ridicule: Some use it only for Mischief, and as a Foundation and Ground for Rebellion: Some keep close to the Literal Sense, and others give the Word of God only that Meaning and Sense that pleases their own Humours, or suits best their present Purpose and Interest.” The confl ict of the extremes threatens to undermine a moderate approach that could somehow allow science and religion to flourish side by side. After a lengthy recounting of errors in historical chronology and cosmogonic detail that demonstrate that the Bible cannot be taken literally, Behn dismisses as wrongheaded Father Andreas Tacquet’s and other apologists’ rearguard attempts to justify Christian cosmogony.25 Good Christians ought to accept Christ’s doctrines in matters of faith but allow experts to adjudicate the historical veracity of the Bible by using textual criticism to reconcile multiple contradictions. Here Behn anticipates Giambattista Vico’s separation of secular history from sacred history. Behn’s reaction to Fontenelle is skillfully conservative on the question of what is allowed in nonfictional narrative. Sarah Goodfellow describes Behn as setting herself up to be “more rigorous, more empirical, and hence more ‘scientific’ and ‘masculine’ than Fontenelle himself.”26 More the anticipatory realist gatekeeper than the celebrant of conjectural fantasy, the female translator can demonstrate a greater hold on reality than a Frenchman who takes a fanciful approach to cosmology. Asserting that the English language has greater affinity with Italian and that French is much harder to translate into English, Behn is also skeptical of the French stress on euphoniousness, which she contrasts with an English demand for meaning. Fontenelle takes greater risks in his libertine rhetoric than Behn credits him for, although she demonstrates with pinpoint accuracy that his inclusion of a female character is patronizing rather than (proto)feminist.27 If Fontenelle opens the door to a mixture of romance and realism and crypto-Orientalist satirical defamiliarization through scientific dialogue, Behn fi rmly shuts it, choosing instead the form of the novella, as discussed in chapter 1. Discursive and generic gatekeeping motivated Behn as much as incipient nationalist and gendered rivalry regarding scientific knowledge. Interestingly, Behn’s Oroonoko is reminiscent of Fontenelle in its modeling of the erotic epistemology of the narrator-Oroonoko relation-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

129

ship, except that in Behn’s case the European woman holds the upper hand while instructing the African prince.

ORIENTALIST BEAST FABLES While the cosmological realism of Fontenelle’s dialogues functions as one fictional dimension of Enlightenment Orientalism, the beast fable might be identified as its symmetrical opposite, summoning interspecies hermeneutics in the place of interplanetary voyages. Two seemingly unconnected genres—scientific dialogue and beast fable—complement each other to form the stereoscopic perspective of Enlightenment Orientalism. Bringing cosmological realism and Orientalist theriophily together, writers such as Swift and Voltaire fashioned enduring satirical fictions such as Gulliver’s Travels, Micromégas, and Zadig. As George Boas defi nes it, “The theoretical—if not psychological—basis of Theriophily is that the beasts—like savages—are more ‘natural’ than man, and hence man’s superior.”28 We will move to these famous satires later in this chapter; this section will focus on an Orientalist beast fable collection whose influence is unsurpassed. Under several titles, including The Book of Kalila and Dimna, Anwari-Suhaili (the Lights of Canopus), The Humayün-nameh, The Moral Philosophy of Doni, Fables of Bidpai, and Tales of Pilpay, a cycle of beast fables came to Europe through complex transformations via Asia and the Levant. Derived from a third-century CE Sanskrit original, The Pañcatantra, and even earlier Buddhist Ja¯taka tales, the cycle functioned as didactic literature featuring moral wisdom. The frame tale of The Pañcatantra features a lion-king, Pin·galaka, convinced by one of his advisers, the jealous jackal Damanaka, to kill the bull Sanjı¯vaka, a trusted retainer. In ensuing translations the jackals became Kalila and Dimna, and eventually in English versions the lion remained regnant while the jackals were changed into a mule and an ass. The Pañcatantra was retailed more extensively in The Katha¯saritasa¯gara, or The Ocean of Story, Somadeva’s compendium of the eleventh century CE.29 The tales, even the Sanskrit originals, functioned as a speculum principis, or mirror-for-princes. A later reorganization of The Pañcatantra, called the Hitopades´a, authored by Narayana, features a counselor called Vis.n.us´arma who is commissioned to educate three foolish princes by their despairing father. 30 The counseling dimensions of the text were refi ned through each linguistic rendition. By the late nineteenth century,

130

chapter three

it was documented that the Bidpai tradition existed in 112 versions in 38 languages and 180 printed editions (see fig. 3.2). Joseph Jacobs, the text’s Victorian editor, demonstrates that the work formally “appealed to all the great religions of the world . . . originated in Buddhism, it was adopted by Brahmanism, passed on by Zoroastrianism to Islam, which transmitted it to Christendom by the mediation of Jews.”31 Another critic proclaims that at one point the text was as important as the entire Aristotelian corpus and the pharmacopoeia of Dioscorides.32 The tales had been adapted in Pahlavi, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew versions before being translated into Latin and then Castilian on the orders of Alfonso X in the thirteenth century, and the Spanish Exemplario version of the stories has been identified as the fi rst major prose fiction in a modern European vernacular. John of Capua’s Latin version, Liber Kalilae et Dimnae: Directorium vitae humanae, also led to an Italian version by Anton Francesco Doni, titled Filosofia morale, which was rendered into English in 1570 by an accomplished translator of Plutarch, Sir Thomas North. As editors of a 2003 edition of North’s translation explain, “the beast fable . . . can play the perfect chameleon in its transmigration from culture to culture.”33 As founding myth as well as translational gift, the fables of Enlightenment Orientalism both transmit and perform transculturation. 34 While the fi rst part (books 1–6) of La Fontaine’s Fables (1668) was mostly drawn from Aesop and other European sources and was dedicated idealistically to the dauphin, his second installment ten years later (books 7–11) is dedicated to Madame de Montespan and cynically aware of the double-dealing that occurred at court around the young Louis XIV, who had begun to assert himself. Acknowledging that “[Pilpay’s] book has been translated into all languages,” La Fontaine confi rms that popular opinion holds Pilpay to be “very old, and earlier than Aesop, if he is not Aesop himself under the guise of the sage Locman.”35 The fi rst fable of La Fontaine’s second collection, “Les animaux malades de la peste,” features a hungry lion and his court in search of voluntary sacrifice by a subject during a time of famine. The carnivorous coterie condemns the herbivorous ass for slaughter when the latter foolishly confesses to having stolen a mouthful of grass from a field, making for an all-too-obvious irony concerning power and influence: “Selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, / Les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir” (According to whether you are strong or weak, / The favor at court will deem you white or black).36 Another poem, “La cour du lion,” shows the lion inviting his vassals to “his Louvre,” where the smell of rotting flesh assails the nostrils of all the invitees. The bear grimaces and

Figure 3.2. Pedigree of Bidpai literature. From Joseph Jacobs, The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai (London: D. Nutt, 1888). Image courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

132

chapter three

holds his nose, for which disrespect he is immediately killed. The monkey flatteringly praises the lion’s enraged response and compares the odor favorably to amber, flowers, and garlic; he is dispatched for flattery. The fox, when asked by the lion what he smelled, craftily excuses himself, as a bad cold prevents him from smelling anything. The epimythium to the fable gives the following discreet advice: “Ne soyez à la cour, si vous voulez y plaire, / Ni fade adulateur, ni parleur trop sincère, / Et tâchez quelquefois de répondre en Normand” (Don’t be at court if you aim to please, / Neither flatterer nor truth-teller be / And when asked, don’t answer, as in Normandy). 37 La Fontaine adds a twist of scientific realism to the beast fable with this volume while indirectly militating against monarchical absolutism. Speaking of the dispute between rationalism and empiricism regarding the trustworthiness of the senses, the fable “Un animal dans la lune” (The Animal in the Moon) shows the arbitrariness of reading the scarred face of the moon as a man, an ox, or an elephant, and the rush to predict the astrological impact of France’s wars with England if the lunar animal were a mouse. Peace is elusive when sovereigns view the world according to their desires rather than by making a neutral evaluation of the facts. The result is not science but faith-based policy—something familiar to us even in recent times. Alongside Aesop (frequently described as an Oriental, or punningly represented as Æsop the Æthiop, the manumitted slave), Ovid, Phaedrus, Babrius, and other classical traditions including Locman in Arabic, the Bidpai collection presented dovetailed fables within an interlaced structure of multiple frames and interpolations, as did The Arabian Nights, with compensation, restitution, and cognitive complexity created through narrative exchange. As North warns in his lucid epistle to the reader, “The similitudes and comparisons do, as they say, hold hands one with the other. They are so linked together, one still depending of another, which, if you sever, desirous to read any tale or story by itself, not comparing the antecedent with the sequel, [besides] that you shall be far from the understanding of the matter” (203). The latticework of the stories was crucial to the narrative movement among the levels, as the frame tale cast some meanings in various degrees of irony given the motivations of the teller and the situation of the listener. North sees these stories as serving as what he calls an “artificial memory.”38 Renaissance versions such as Doni’s and North’s relied heavily on woodcut illustrations that worked to discipline readers according to received emblematic traditions that realigned posture, disposition, and attitudes of legibility (see fig 3.3). These images anchored read-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

133

Figure 3.3. The Tortoise and the Geese. From the 1601 edition of Sir Thomas North, The morall philosophie of Doni (London: Simon Stafford, 1601), 64. By permission of the British Library. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark: C.33.f.2.

ers within assumptions about the relationship between the literal and the symbolic. The functions of analogy and correspondence could multiply story upon story in spiraling epicycles of cross-wired textuality that could reencapsulate the origin. These fables are autotelic and heterotelic, subtracting and encapsulating, moralizing and divesting by transition to other stories that often argue the opposite point to that just expounded. Ideally, fables resemble riddles, producing “epistemic lack” and “delayed evaluation”; a trial-anderror cognitive mapping of their meaning takes place among their readers and listeners, as North’s editors have argued, and attempts to rein in fable by a short-leash moralism were never entirely successful because, as they perceptively add, “moralizing codes reduce potentially subtle fables to banal preachments.”39 Joseph Harris, who rendered these tales as the highly popular Fables of Pilpay by 1699, did so in a context that was already very receptive to fables in both verse and prose. John Dryden had experienced huge success

134

chapter three

with his Fables Ancient and Modern, as had Roger L’Estrange. Earlier, John Ogilby’s Fables had already achieved fame in the context of the English Civil War, where warring factions expressed their allegiances through religious prophecy, beast fable, and other forms of allegory. Pilpay went through many editions in English, as did Bidpai in French. La Fontaine had adapted many tales from the French translation of the Anwar-i-Suhaili for his verse fables. Indirect fabulation appeared to be the order of the day: a mid-eighteenth-century writer of a preface to Pilpay quotes Joseph Addison: “Allegories when well chosen are like so many Tracks of Light in a Discourse that makes every thing about them clear and beautiful.” About the putative Indian philosopher, we are told that “he here lays before all Kings and Princes the best and wisest Methods of governing their Subjects, couched under the Disguise of Histories of Things which happened among Birds and Beasts, as well as those of his own Species.”40 The association of Eastern wisdom with biblical parable had deep roots. Fable was indeed the most ancient way of instructing, and therefore any attempt “to condemn it, is declaring against the common Sense of Mankind.”41 Some versions change the ending of Kalila and Dimna, as English readers tended to fi nd Dimna’s victory shocking. While Christian morality and eighteenth-century poetic justice needed good to triumph over evil, the radical moral realist epistemology of Bidpai implied that Machiavellian behavior was more likely to succeed. Along with the Nights and the tradition around Juvenal’s sixth satire, many Bidpai stories feature misogyny, such as those about “the husband who tied up his wife, and the old bawd who lost her nose.”42 The translation of these highly allusive interconnected fables into Christian European contexts interacted with print culture, which allowed the creation of section headings, prescriptive promythia, and long-winded epimythia that applied, interpreted, and limited the epitomizing meanings of the tales, converting Bidpai into Ciceronian moral philosophy. These foreign beast fables were also married to indigenous linguistic proverbs and local traditions.43 By such hybridization, beast fable appeared autochthonous, though the evidence for its massive import is undeniable.44 There was another significant Persian narrative tradition around the Sindibadnama, which had sometimes been conflated with Sindbad, and Sendebar had also been confused with Bidpai. Revealing these roots from the East allows for the belated recognition of fabulistic forms as simultaneously imported and home-grown, erudite and naive, exotic and folkloric, Orientalist and autochthonous. The intersection of stories with metaphysical discourses was not pe-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

135

culiarly European, as Jalal al-din Rumi’s Mathnawi subordinates the Bidpai tales to a Sufi spiritualist objective.45 Unlike the gnomic fable of King Psamennitus in Herodotus, discussed in this book’s conclusion, the tales of Bidpai were loquacious. Juxtaposing various analogies between the animal kingdom and human society, the fables transition from story to discourse and back again. Frame tales and interpolations are constantly recalibrated and opened to discussion and debate. The deceit of counselors was an age-old populist theme with respect to royalist societies, where the vicissitudes of politics were embodied through the rise and fall of individuals at court. Montesquieu would base the departure of Usbek from the Persian court on this very theme. The additional success of François Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque (published at the same time as Pilpay) had brought the speculum principis into prominence as a popular genre. Unlike several types of writing that conceal their status as fiction by pretending to be histories, such as the early versions of the eighteenthcentury English novel, fables are openly indirect fictions whose meaning relies on readerly hermeneutics. Alexander Pope adapts a Pilpay story in The Guardian no. 61 with the fable of the traveler and the adder, even as he ridicules Ambrose Philips for being willing to retail “a Persian tale in English for half-a-crown” and confiding to others that he wanted to write a “wild Persian tale.”46 Pope’s fable from Pilpay is brought up to inculcate compassion toward animals, a trait associated with Indian sensibilities based on beliefs in metempsychosis and the practice of vegetarianism. Deploring English pastimes such as cockfighting and bearbaiting, Pope complains that “Man . . . seeks out and pursues even the most inoffensive Animals, on purpose to prosecute and destroy them.”47 Pope argues that it is a violation of the laws of hospitality to murder birds (such as swallows and martins) that nest within human habitations. The usefulness of animals only increases cruelty, Pope believes: cats, owls, and frogs would be subject to “unheard-of Torments” if the English found them to be edible.48 A list of barbaric forms of cruelty toward animals follows, including the practice of hunting; Pope excoriates the savage compliment that huntsmen pay to ladies present at the death of a stag, “when they put the Knife in their Hands to cut the Throat of a helpless, trembling and weeping Creature.”49 This nonfictional meditation inspired by Indian morals now fi nds a fictional analogy in medieval romance, as there is “nothing more shocking, or horrid, than the Prospect of one of [the English] Kitchins cover’d with Blood, and fi lled with the Cries of Creatures expiring in Tortures. It gives one an Image of a Giant’s Den in a Romance, bestrow’d with scattered Heads and mangled Limbs of those

136

chapter three

who were slain by his Cruelty.”50 Pope skillfully uses the defamiliarization techniques of Enlightenment Orientalism for a critique of quotidian culinary practice. The East is yet again the moral ideal that is worth emulating: Pope refers to an Arabian author—probably ibn Tufay’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, which I previously discussed—writing of a man on a desert island who assists animals in their wants and distresses.51 Pope’s Pythagorean and cryptovegetarian prolegomena leads to the beast fable from Pilpay that reinforces animal-friendly moral sentiments, although, as we shall see, the tale culminates in a radically surprising outcome. The tale called “The Man and the Adder” in Pilpay can also be found in Chardin’s highly successful Voyages to Persia. A man saves an adder caught in the middle of a fi re by using a stick to introduce a bag into which the snake crawls so that it can be pulled out of the fl ames. Released from the bag, the snake threatens to sting the man, who accuses it of foul play: “I shall do no more (said the Adder) than what you Men practise every Day, whose Custom it is to requite Benefits with Ingratitude.”52 When the man requests mediation, a tree and a cow back up the adder, asserting that men exploit them for shade and wood, and calves and milk respectively, and then demonstrate their ingratitude by chopping down trees and sending cows to the butcher’s. A fi nal mediation with a fox leads to a startling development: “upon hearing the Story in all its Circumstances, [the fox] could not be persuaded it was possible for the Adder to enter in so narrow a Bag. The Adder to convince him went in again; when the Fox told the Man he had now his Enemy in his Power, and with that he fastened the Bag, and crushed him to Pieces.”53 Pope tells this story on the heels of an essay pleading for compassion toward animals, but on fi rst reading the story does anything but make that case. In fact, the casual conclusion, in which the noxious animal is crushed, ends abruptly with no epimythium in Pope’s rendition, though Harris’s version adopted the usual story-cycle practice of transitioning from one tale to the other with metafictional commentary, in this case a dialogue between a rat and a raven that suggests that enemies’ promises cannot be trusted and we should learn to distinguish between friend and enemy. The vulpine has trumped the serpentine; further, by choosing to assist the man, the fox communicates that naive forms of reciprocity with the animal kingdom are unwise. A subtle metafictional angle is revealed, however: by repeating the act of going into the bag, the adder proves that the story was empirically verifiable. By promoting a mimetic belief in repeatability and verisimilitude, the story conveys a moralist’s vision of the determinable and didactic as-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

137

pects of “life.” The fox, on the other hand, believes in both applicability and transcendence, showing that too much belief in realist determinacy is dangerous. Imitation is the best form of flattery, but by asking the snake to reenact its deliverance, the fox runs narrative time backward to the point where the story’s outcome can change. A single act of compassion by one man is “unreadable” by the snake. However, why does the fox show solidarity with the gullible man over against the adder? Is he thereby a traitor to the animal kingdom? Given that the human-vulpine alliance is not a convention that can last and is without any deeper narrative framework, especially as foxes are hunted rather than treasured by men, isn’t the fox setting himself up, doing to the man as the man did to the adder, helping him out when he should be letting well alone? What the tale reveals is subtle role reversal. The fox’s canniness is “human” even as the man’s gullibility is “animal”; amoral detachment trumps compassionate projection. The fox reveals the narrative principle of fable, whereby permutation radically changes the outcome and destabilizes the possibility of any moral takeaway. How will the man repay the fox after having learned his lesson, in the manner of the adder, repaying his kindness with revenge, or in the manner of the fox, who just saved him from imminent death? And how does all this interpretive complexity help Pope drive home the point that his compatriots should be compassionate to animals? The presence of the story cancels out the naturalistic moralism of the compassionate counsel that preceded it. Or is the story hinting that compassion should derive from a higher source not founded on the simple selfinterest of mutual use, dependency, and reciprocity? The subtlety of the tale is typical of the genre. Did Pope bite off more than he could chew in saving the fable from the flames of narrative oblivion, as did the man with the adder? Or was Pope serving up the fable’s nonapplicability as the secret outcome of an apparent applicability, in the manner of the fox tricking the adder? If, as is conventionally assumed, the fable is the body and the moral the soul of the narration, this fable’s body and soul, after being saved from the flames of the anecdotal fi re, disappear into the mangled body of the adder, crushed to pieces. In Harris’s translation, the metafictional level, even if present, kicks the same problem sideways, as the raven and rat have to work out the meaning of this parable with respect to how friends and enemies would end up treating each other. As Annabel Patterson’s book on Renaissance fables demonstrates, fables became highly contestable screen allegories. Having entered political debates decisively after a hiatus in the medieval period, they were fictions of group identification and codification abbreviated through habit and

138

chapter three

common knowledge, with interpretations almost functioning in the manner of shibboleths, as the interpretation would in all likelihood (though not unerringly) reveal the political identification of the interpreter. This continues into the post–English Civil War era. For instance, in the late period, Dryden’s fables were royalist and moderately pro-Catholic, L’Estrange’s 1692 fables were pro-Jacobite, and Samuel Croxall’s 1722 collection was clearly Whiggish. However, Swift was appealing to a more universal and transcendental register with his fabulous satires, which have been read as conservative by undermining all received political positions. While many of the periodicals in which the short fables appeared, such as the Spectator, were Whiggish, the success of this mode of Enlightenment Orientalism took the conte philosophique in other directions too—witness Johnson’s Rasselas and many more conservative applications of the oriental tale, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century.54 However, the evaporation of the very tight political interpretive frameworks that had been imposed—along with the rise of unmotivated reading—meant that greater interpretive license was possible with no obvious outcomes anticipated, until the moralists moved in to reinforce with normative contexts that which had been rendered less politically relevant. “The Man and the Adder” already allows for free interpretation, self-determining rather than group-determined. By supplementing the fable with the novel, we could also arrive at the oriental tale—the genre that corresponds best to the mode of Enlightenment Orientalism—as a further development from the naive novel, a phenomenon chapter 5 will examine with reference to examples such as The History of Nourjahad. The antirealist oriental tale is part of a broader tradition of prose fiction rather than something to be dismissed as an insufficiently realist or a faulty novel. The modernizing nature of Enlightenment Orientalism makes it both retrospective and prospective, rather than only a holdover from earlier times. By midcentury, the Aesop tradition in England takes over from the Pilpay stories, whereby the success of fable from the Civil War to the Augustan period—from Ogilby, Dryden, Croxall, and L’Estrange to John Gay, Edward Moore, and John Hall-Stevenson—had also merged with the importance of French imports such as Le Bossu, La Fontaine, and La Motte. With the rise of a sophisticated middle-class reading public, short verse fables get submerged into popular culture, though the notion of fable as connected with complex plot (as in Latin fabula) persists. James Beattie’s terminology in 1783 about the theory of fiction is revealing, as he discusses the novel under the heading of “modern romance, or, poetical prose fable,” perhaps yet another version of Fielding’s comic epic poem

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

139

in prose.55 If verse fable begins to decline into a minor tradition by the late 1730s in favor of various forms of prose fiction, as many argue, the transition is fairly seamless, as Richardson was himself a grand exponent of the Aesopian printer’s tradition, publishing Aesop’s Fables the year before writing Pamela. Both Pamela and Clarissa make rich intertextual references to the preexisting fable tradition.56 But fable had also melded very successfully with enduring prose versions, eventually turning into the mode of Enlightenment Orientalism, whether as the type of the conte philosophique favored by Swift and Voltaire or as the quick occasional fare for newspapers and magazines served up by many minor periodical writers, as documented well by Robert Mayo’s seminal study.57 It was nonetheless the case that the mainline of fable had collapsed into certain straitjacketed forms of moralism. Robert Dodsley’s Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists: In three books (1761) would be unchallenged until century’s end. Dodsley would have as a justificatory epigraph Milton’s statement from Paradise Lost, book 8, that animals can also reason.58 Yet in various critical prefatory remarks Dodsley desires to limit fable’s indeterminacy. The didactic aims of the moralist are at the fore when he claims that Aesop’s “principal aim was to select such Fables as would make the strongest and most useful impressions on the minds of youth.”59 After a synoptic redaction of the complex tradition surrounding the Vita Aesopi, Dodsley attaches “An Essay on Fable,” which argues that each fable’s intention should be to illustrate one moral or prudential maxim and that only natural incidents with apposite characters should be displayed. Fables should always convey moral or useful truth beneath the shadow of allegory, whereas the key feature that distinguishes a fable from a tale was that the tale has no moral. Much of this is stated as if fables were transparent vehicles that provide a truth; Dodsley avoids the complexity of the inexistent boundary line between romance and fable. He is opposed to the presence of a detached or explicit moral, as that would insult the intelligence of the reader, and claims that Aesop rejected attaching morals before or after fables for the same reason. Wanting fables to respect probability and realism, Dodsley reins in some of the wildness of fabulistic animism: “the swelling mountain may, naturally enough, be delivered of a mouse . . . the axe may sollicit a new handle of the forest; and the moon, in her female character, request a fashionable garment. Here is nothing incongruous; nothing that shocks the reader with impropriety. On the other hand, were the axe to desire a periwig, and the moon petition for a new pair of boots; probability would then be violated, and the absurdity become too glaring.”60 Playing it safe, Dodsley wants to stay with the familiar, as that

140

chapter three

is better for moral insinuation. Morals were often attached in a provisional way to fables as promythia to serve an indexical function. Of course, the slippery sands of fable ironized and upended the morals. Moralists such as Dodsley move in to stifle the imaginative potential contained within the tales. However, there would still be occasional exceptions with respect to fables that trafficked in the structure of Enlightenment Orientalism—for example, Gray’s wonderful “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes,” a poetic anecdote that is beautifully analyzed by Suvir Kaul as an allegory of eighteenth-century Orientalist commodification alongside critiques of it.61 The instability created by fable in a narrative context (given the surprising complexity of even a brief one such as the tale of “The Man and the Adder”) becomes a target for authors and critics who exercise didactic power on the boundaries of the realist novel. The curing of Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (with Samuel Johnson’s notorious intervention), the disabusement of Catherine Morland by Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, and the screed against fables in the extended reading of La Fontaine’s “The Crow and the Fox” in Rousseau’s Émile are all cases in point. In each case we see a disciplinary scene of correct reading, whereby national realist authority expels fable, romance, oriental tale, and other fictional forms while reasserting approved generic protocols. Yet isn’t the moral counselor at the end of these novels, or in Rousseau’s Émile, a figure just like Burzoë, the royal counselor who tells the Bidpai tales in the Pahlavi version, and who heals the sick mind that has confused fact and fiction—whether in royal torpor or quixotic disorientation—in the manner of an ancient psychoanalyst? Fables are verisimilar in their application if not in their literality. The tale-teller was always a feature of medieval courts, as was Scheherezade, a crucial relay point within traditional story collections such as The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. The obliviousness of romance readers allows daily life to intrude upon them to incendiary effect, such as the maid sleeping over a book who caused the fi re in the queen’s chambers in Swift’s Lilliput, or the cook-maid reading late at night who started the fi re in Lovelace’s Bedford Square accommodations in Richardson’s Clarissa.62

PSEUDOETHNOGRAPHY AND THERIOPHILY Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was initially published under the title Travel Through Several Remote Nations of the World (1726, 1735).63 It is well known that Swift was parodying the vogue, since the Renaissance, for lit-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

141

erature of voyage and discovery, which had spawned a range of genres from political utopia (Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis) to colonial ethnography (Jean de Léry’s Voyage au Brésil), and from the philosophical essay (Montaigne’s “Des canibales”) to the true relation (Behn’s Oroonoko) to the spiritual (pseudo)autobiography (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). According to Michael McKeon, the genres that use travel narrative as their main content transition from the aristocratic ideology of romance idealism to the progressive ideology of naive empiricism— and Swift’s satirical reworking of these genres synthesizes these earlier strains into conservative skepticism.64 Swift is unsparing in his satire of the “General Heads” indicated for the writing of travel reports by Royal Society scientist Robert Boyle. Boyle wanted the traveler to proceed from natural science to social science, advancing from a general geographical description of the earth to local landscape and cartography, from which an observer could assume that individual cultures are derived from the landscape and attached to it: “Above the ignobler Productions of the Earth, there must be a careful account given of the Inhabitants themselves, both Natives and Strangers that have been long settled there; And in particular, their Stature, Shape, Colour, Features, Strength, Agility, Beauty (or the want of it), Complexions, Hair, Dyet, Inclinations, and Customs that seem not Due to Education. As to their Women (besides the other things) may be observed their Fruitfulness or Barrenness; their hard or easy Labour, etc.”65 Boyle assumes that abstract principles of data gathering can be applied willy-nilly to different locations without much attention to interaction, transparency, and context. How can the casual traveler distinguish between a native and a stranger when newly arrived in a place? Especially hilarious from a contemporary perspective is Boyle’s aspiration to evaluate inclinations and customs that are natural rather than learned. Books 1, 2, and 4 of Gulliver’s Travels follow Boyle’s pattern to parody the failure of protoanthropological objectivity. With its multiple stagings of colonial encounter, Gulliver’s Travels features phantasmagorical cartography and unverifiable ethnography in good measure.66 As fictional protagonists, Behn’s Oroonoko and Swift’s Gulliver share a joint debt to the scientific and cosmological realism of Fontenelle, while certain aspects of classicist and Orientalist beast fable are transmogrified in relation to the narrative landscape. Behn’s hero, transposed to Surinam from an African/Oriental setting, experiences the flora and fauna as novelty without predictability. Implausibility signifies unprocessed authenticity, whereas verisimilitude suggests the mediation of the hackneyed figure. Furthermore, with Oroonoko and Gulliver’s Travels we are in the realm of

142

chapter three

human-animal morphological confusion and mutual mimetic representation among these species: “Marmosets, a sort of Monkey as big as a Rat or Weesel, but of a marvelous and delicate shape, and has Face and Hands like an Humane Creature: and Cousheries, a little Beast in the form and fashion of a Lion, as big as Kitten; but so exactly made in all parts like that noble Beast, that it is it in Minature.”67 However, if the reader looks for antiquarian antecedents within the overt references to beast fable, they are not hard to fi nd. For instance, among Oroonoko’s heroic performances of various herculean labors for the narrator and her friends, the slaying of a man-eating tiger (or jaguar) is reminiscent of the Nemean lion episode of Hercules’s fi rst labor, and the unfortunate accident with the “NumbEel” evokes the Lernaean hydra of the second labor. When captured by the ship’s captain, Oroonoko embodies a Plutarchan simile: he “may be best resembl’d to a Lion taken in a Toil.”68 Behn’s and Swift’s reaching for classical/Oriental fable provides a background of allusive or narratological assonance, and New World wonders documented by Christopher Columbus and Walter Raleigh are paradigmatic equivalents of the magical East as figured within Pliny’s Natural History or the medieval tales of Mandeville or Marco Polo.69 Gulliver’s listless wanderings through his four voyages parody Burzoë’s quest for the secret of life and death, just as much as the correspondence instructions of the Royal Society are sent up by the Lilliputian reports, which defamiliarize the objects found in the pockets of the man-mountain Gulliver, whether it be a comb, a diary, or spectacles.70 In Swift’s time, the Far East and the Far West continue to overlap in the European imagination. We only have to take into account the scholarship that has pinned down Gulliver’s imaginary voyages as taking place in the vast (and then still largely uncharted) areas of the Pacific. Well into the eighteenth century, the way to the Pacific from Europe was by going farther east beyond East Asia and Indonesia, as very few expeditions could mount a trans-Pacific voyage.71 The Pacific, even if both Far West and Far East, mostly represented a farther–than–Far East inflected with expectations conditioned by European knowledge of China and Japan. Ongoing awareness of the existence of the Australasian landmass, sometimes confusedly rendered as the virtualized area of the South Seas, would develop into the idea of Oceania only somewhat later, after the impact of Captain Cook’s voyages, as redacted by John Hawkesworth, and the French expeditions headed by Antoine Bougainville. It has become de rigueur to read Gulliver’s Travels as a text that reflects deeply on colonialism, with many classical as well as contemporaneous

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

143

allusions and references to the Far East, Africa, South America, Australia, and other remote places worked into the text along with English and Irish settings that were obviously far more familiar to Swift. Some of Swift’s precursors include Vairasse d’Allais’s L’histoire des Sévarambes and Foigny’s La Terre australe connue, mentioned earlier. Gulliver as a ship’s surgeon is presented as a chauvinistic British Everyman by the end of the four voyages. This position is combined with a powerful anticolonial diatribe against British commerce that some have argued is a function of Swift’s own deepening Anglo-Irish attachments. Is Gulliver’s steady retreat into hippophilia and equitherapy insanity or a radical critique of anthropocentrism? The depiction of the faraway colonial encounter is put in dialogue with the construct of the long-ago, an equivalency that by the late seventeenth century had increasingly been argued, famously in the preface to Racine’s Bajazet, the best known of around thirty harem plays produced in France in the seventeenth century.72 Or as G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter put it more recently, “The anthropological fantasies of the philosophes did not so much time-travel backwards or forwards but sideways.”73 Late medieval collections such as Marco Polo’s mostly factual Voyages (popularized by Giovanni Battista Ramusio) competed with Mandeville’s deliriously fantastic Travels in presenting fictions about strange peoples and customs in distant lands that combined myth, exotica, and species anxiety with plausible ethnographic information. Meanwhile, the seventeenth-century obsession with resolving biblical and pagan chronologies led to the rich print tradition of polyglot Bibles.74 Concerns around colonialism and anticolonialism in recent interpretations of Swift have overshadowed study of the related but distinct Orientalist allusions in Gulliver’s Travels. Systematic defamiliarization of the reader is a major textual objective of the work, as it was for Marana and Montesquieu. Swift relies occasionally on Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. By 1783, the Scottish critic James Beattie would discuss the remarkable similarity between Gulliver and Sindbad, as both possess commercial wanderlust as well as a hunger for exotic curios and other marvels and wonders to bring home.75 Gulliver’s abduction from Brobdingnag by a giant eagle is reminiscent of the mythical roc from The Arabian Nights and Marco Polo’s and Cyrano’s voyages, and there are similarities between the hairy apes that invade Sindbad’s ship and the yahoos of the fourth voyage.76 Swift’s Orientalist references gain further credibility by mixing the verifiable with the invented, as did Galland’s stories of Ali Baba and Aladdin, which have no antecedents in Arabic manuscript culture preceding

144

chapter three

Galland. However, Swift did borrow and refashion a great amount, and that is what makes the text such a brilliant intervention in relation to the travelogue genre. For instance, the famous episode in Lilliput wherein Gulliver puts out the fi re in the Queen’s apartments by micturation is a straightforward borrowing from Mandeville’s account of China, where it is suggested that within the court of the great Khan, mingere intra domum peccatum capitale (pissing indoors was a capital offense).77 Swift combines the romance angle of utopian writing with coruscating satire. The allusiveness of the account of the fourth voyage has led to the republican horses being compared to the New World Tupinamba eulogized by Montaigne, or to Old World Spartans, and the Yahoos are frequently discussed as Africanized, Celticized, or primitivized in relation to eighteenth-century European norms of civility.78 Swift also makes frequent reference to Chinese and Japanese sources; his patron, William Temple, published a book on Chinese gardens that Swift probably edited. Temple’s library at Moor Park was where Swift read considerable travel and discovery literature, and Temple’s most famous disquisition concerning ancient cultural multiplicity, Of Heroic Virtue, certainly had an impact on Swift’s ideas concerning other civilizations. Interestingly, Temple praised Peru, China, Scythia, and Arabia in his comparative text, which as a geocultural survey became something of a cliché by the eighteenth century, as in Samuel Johnson’s famous opening phrase to The Vanity of Human Wishes, “Let Observation with extensive view, / Survey mankind, from China to Peru.” It has been suggested that the Houyhnhnm-Yahoo divide ranges back to Temple’s discussion of the difference between the cultivation of the Han Chinese and the supposedly barbaric ways of the Tartars or Mongols who, throughout history, the Chinese attempted to keep at bay. The supposed civilizational superiority of China was a projection going back to the Jesuit missions to the Middle Kingdom, which praised Confucian rationalism and its accomplishments in printing, fi reworks, scientific fi ndings, statecraft, justice, bureaucratic efficiency, pacifism, gardening, and the visual arts. This led to a veritable goût chinois throughout the early modern period, with praise of China coming from intellectuals including Bayle, Leibniz, Bolingbroke, Malebranche, and Voltaire.79 Philosophers such as Christian Wolff defended Chinese advancement over Europe’s in vigorous public debate. Considerable European anxiety was aroused over chronologies showing Chinese, Babylonian, and Aztec civilizations to be older than biblical accounts suggested. In response, the Chinese were portrayed either as crypto-Christians or as natural deists who had progressed beyond superstitious and irrational forms of religion.80

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

145

Others have seen the Yahoos as a version of the Yedzo or the Ainu, the supposedly hairy indigenes described in early European ethnographies of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The Yahoos might also be equivalents of the Spartan helots, and the Houyhnhms’ occasionally murderous behavior toward them is reminiscent of the historical massacres of the helots by the krupteia, the Spartan secret police.81 If the horses represent ironic versions of Confucian rationalism, Swift both acknowledges and undermines Temple’s naiveté regarding Chinese perfection. Frank Boyle and others have suggested that Swift sent a copy of Gulliver’s Travels to China and was initially planning to write a satire that would feature a trip to the Far East—something that Gulliver’s Travels does end up including, if somewhat furtively. The Houyhnhnm accents that Gulliver cannot imitate are suggestive of tones in spoken Chinese. The dullness of the Houyhnhnms corresponds to the imputed affectlessness of the Chinese. As men without qualities, inscrutable Orientals can be figured as pinnacles of perfection that ultimately undermine themselves by their insipidity. In this form of Enlightenment Orientalism, utopia and dystopia are truly indistinguishable. The ultimate joke is on Gulliver, who recognizes himself as a British Yahoo, unable to avoid the self-loathing and psychic trauma confronted with the orifices, smells, and cancerous outgrowths of the human body. Gulliver cannot reemerge from his last cultural immersion, living in a stable where he can smell horse dung while stopping his ears from hearing human folly. Is this a representation of the dead end of European cultural narcissism that leads to insanity? Or is it the sign of an incommensurability that cannot be communicated adequately to the reader? The indeterminacy of the outcome allows the satire to continue to cast the spell that it does on so many readers, suggesting a transition from animal rationale, human being, to animal hinnibile, horse, or as the onomatopoeic name suggests, the Houyhnhnm. It is worth remembering that Swift’s innovation was not unusual: Jean de Segrais discusses a republic of dogs in L’isle imaginaire (1658). Swift’s use of animals is sometimes described as a theriophilic paradox that combines cultural criticism with utopian primitivism (as compared to all the other societies Gulliver visits, the Houyhnhnms have no writing and are the most technologically ancient).82 By way of theriophily, Swift is also exploring a Pyrrhonism that derived from Montaigne and Pierre Charron, combined with an earlier Plutarchian strain. He accepts Temple’s Chinese utopianism only to give up on it as the satire comes to a conclusion, in which the collapse of Chinese utopianism and equine ideal-

146

chapter three

ism leads to complete dehumanization. Swift is reacting to seventeenthcentury Cartesianism and the empiricist experiments of the Royal Society. The concept of the machine is entirely rejected, including any concept of the animal as machine, and in an inversion of humanist theodicy, human beings are assumed to be morally inferior to beasts, who either reason better or possess moral virtues that human beings lack. As we already saw with reference to Pope’s brief fable, what better way is there to create a combination of Orientalist defamiliarization and cosmological realism than by indicating that humans are morally inferior to animals? By attempting to pass as a Houyhnhnm, mimicking the gait, gestures, and accents of horses, and by his unshakable identification with Houyhnhnm forms of reasoning, Gulliver demonstrates the ultimate form of xenophilia: interspecies romance. Earlier he was described unflatteringly by the Brobdingnagians as lusus naturae, given that he was too welldeveloped to be an embryo and too small to be a Brobdingnagian dwarf. Thus Swift’s satire drifts toward an unintegrable hybridity or inimitable singularity with respect to human-animal incompatibilities. Like the encounter between the man and the adder in Pope’s fable—which cannot fit with any simple moral—interspecies encounter in Gulliver’s Travels enacts cosmological incongruity. But this is a position through which the satirist can acknowledge major aspects of cultural novelty and feature relativist epistemology. True cultural encounter occurs not at false moments of “choice” between one culture and another but at moments of psychic necessity, when the subject acts according to deep-rooted dispositions that are self-revelatory. While Erica Fudge notes about beast fable in general that “the animal is used to discuss issues in the human domain, and because of this, the animal as animal vanishes,” Gulliver’s Travels does the opposite by meticulously working out the corporeal effects of the senseperception that would be needed to create knowledge of the world with the assistance of an equine body rather than a hominid one.83 Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss asserted famously that “animals are good to think [with],” and indeed animals make for the construction of mythopoetic and psychic materials that straightforward referential prose cannot allow easily.84 We might analogize this loosely as equivalent to how nonrealist and fabulist Orientalist fiction in the eighteenth century works differently from what has become the all-too-familiar nationalrealist variety. Gulliver is an equivocal horse-whisperer who might very well bring down all humanisms, and with them all forms of national realism that rely on humanist antecedents and territorial identities. While there has been some discussion of Swiftian “bestiality” (as alleged even in

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

147

his time by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), it might very well be said that one man’s bestiality could be another man’s interspecies companionship, and a particular philosophy of anthropocentric humanism is undermined fundamentally by a satirical thought-experiment focusing on humananimal interactions and alternative zoontologies. There was no paucity of earlier antireligious satire by Swift, with A Tale of a Tub being put on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, but the zoontology implied by the encounter with the Houyhnhnms is perhaps even more profoundly threatening to conventional religious values than just another attack on institutionalized religion.85 I have discussed elsewhere some of the racialized ways in which the exoticization of humans as pets worked during the period, and this information can be applied as a productive framework for analysis of Gulliver as both pet and pet keeper, as has been recently argued.86 Talking to horses is not necessarily a sign of insanity but the signaling of a nonanthropocentric alternative as yet unexplored by the scientific Enlightenment. Talking horses suggest the multiple perspectives of theriophily, whether conventional superstitions about animals as satanic familiars or notions of metamorphosis, metempsychosis, and vegetarianism imported from the East. As Kathleen Williams pointed out long ago, insects and small animals—wasps, the Splacknuck, and the little monkey—keep appearing in the second voyage. Brobdingnag begins the process of decentering the account of Gulliver, the human animal. Is Gulliver’s last voyage gesturing toward a posthuman and interspecies future rather than merely enacting an irrational dead end?87 Ultimately, the close relationship between beast fable and accounts of state formation is what makes for the additional connections between Orientalism and reflections on political structure in Gulliver’s Travels. As Howard Bloch suggests in an intriguing essay on fables by Marie de France, the beast fable, from Aesop to Phaedrus and Babrius, appears at crucial moments of state formation in the West, and this collocation of simplicity and complexity was also seized upon by Jacques Derrida in his analysis of Hobbes and La Fontaine in relation to the early modern structure of sovereignty.88 The Pañcatantra also originated at a time when civil administration arose in the late classical India of the fourth and fi fth centuries CE.89 In light of this, beast fable in Gulliver’s Travels could be read in part as a secret riposte to the early modern genre of political philosophy. It is a short hoof’s length from the idealized court culture of Kalila wa Dimna, in which the traditional image of sovereignty, the lion, is undermined by the courtier antics of jackals, or mules, to its inversion by Swiftian satire,

148

chapter three

where the fi nal exploration of a Spartan-inspired republic of horses begins to look and feel very much like a hybridized third space developing from the interactions between Eastern fable and European classical forms. When Gulliver fi rst arrives in Houyhnhnmland, there is a repetition of the standard traveler’s defamiliarization to the natives, combined with wild conjecture and instrumentality. His negative description of the Yahoos suggests that they are beasts, but also potentially human beings of a different racial stock that are being misrecognized as animals. He faces symbolic rejection when they “began to Discharge their Excrements on [his] Head.”90 Gulliver’s fight-or-fl ight response is preempted when the fi rst horses show up, but they proceed to examine him in the hyperobjective manner in which the “General Heads” suggested that Europeans examine others, except that mariners were more frequently criminals and renegades than the objective scientists the Royal Society expected them to be.91 The horses receive Gulliver’s attempted civilities with disdain, though they appear pleasantly surprised by his linguistic teachability—the horses themselves “have not the least Idea of Books or Literature.”92 Their republican simplicity consists of pure presence and simple world-making that excludes technology as falsehood. Gulliver cannot convince them of his arrival by ship; they charge that he “said the thing which was not.”93 Of course the Houyhnhnm culture, by disallowing lying, disallows any kind of fiction—and for that matter the legal profession.94 Houyhnhnm disdain at the shining stones that the Yahoos fight over indicate that the Houyhnhnm mind fi nds symbolic exchange structures such as money incomprehensible. Houyhnhnm ontology cannot countenance narratives of elsewhere or descriptions of unseen machines. As “Houyhnhnm” means “horse” and also “the Perfection of Nature,” existence and perfection reduplicate without irony. Gulliver is narrating wholly from the position of the Oriental and anthropological object; the examining subject is a horse, initially misidentified by Gulliver as a magician in disguise who could spirit him elsewhere. Gulliver loathes himself when he is compared with the Yahoos, but he cannot prevent the Houyhnhnms’ exploration of the morphological resemblances between him and the Yahoos. He experiences the exact inversion of human-animal logic when he drives home to his Houyhnhnm master that his countrymen would not understand how “a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding Creature of a Nation, and a Yahoo the Brute.”95 The pure symbolic inversion allowed by cosmological Orientalism, as we saw with Fontenelle, is an ontological shift, a “presiding creature” that is normally equated with “Man” but suddenly decoupled from its con-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

149

tent, while “the Brute” is a debased “Man” given the name of “Yahoo.” Metaphysical content is not just mental but corporeal, and content follows form, suggesting the very opposite of the Cartesianism that divorces mind from its animalistic/mechanistic body. Furthermore, form predicts function, and Gulliver’s master is scathing about his differential advantage for either strength or swiftness. In fact, Gulliver’s morphology suffers even in comparison to the Yahoos’ own, being much more cleanly, and not altogether so deformed; but in point of real Advantage he thought I differed for the worse. That my Nails were of no Use either to my fore or Hinder Feet: As to my fore Feet, he could not properly call them by that Name, for he never observed me to walk upon them; that they were too soft to bear the Ground. . . . He then began to fi nd fault with other Parts of my Body; the Flatness of my Face, the Prominence of my Nose, mine Eyes placed directly in Front, so that I could not look on either Side without turning my Head: That I was not able to feed my self, without lifting one of my fore Feet to my Mouth: And therefore Nature had placed those Joints to answer that Necessity.96

Equine phenomenology trumps hominid habitus. Equine organs of senseperception are sources for both nomenclature and functional perfection. Gulliver is inadequate for equine rationality, as he does not possess a quadruped body or a 360˚ (rather than 180˚) visual relationship to space.97 Politics in Houyhnhnmland consists of the permanent repetition of a grand debate concerning whether the Yahoos should be eliminated or tolerated—“yahoo” of course means “the beast” as well as an adjective to denote “evil,” “folly,” or “foulness.”98 Gulliver, as a recent trouvaille of his master’s, is dragged forward as an impossible exemplar of yahoo perfectibility and thereby faces elimination. Like all true utopias, Houyhnhnmland cannot allow its equilibrium, founded on inertia, to be disrupted by the eruption of an event. Gulliver’s presence constitutes an unclassifiably hybrid event, a Houyhnhnm mentality in a yahoo body. He needs to be expelled, as he ends up symbolizing falsehood or fiction. Gulliver becomes a pure conversion of fact into value: he is, but he cannot really be; therefore, to eliminate the philosophical contradiction, he ought not to be, as that would reestablish the equilibrium that his presence has disrupted. This is the ultimate irony: much as Gulliver is getting used to the purity of a life that he experiences subjectively, the Houyhnhnms deem him to be objectively impossible. As an experience of the impossible, he just cannot be

150

chapter three

countenanced. However, the phenomenological support of equine mentalism cannot be eschewed: Gulliver conceives a horror of his own reflection even as he attempts to trot and neigh in the manner of a horse. Expulsion has to be accepted by the accused as rational and just. Compulsion is unknown among the Houyhnhnms, and rational decree is respected as universal truth. All exhortations are acted upon as unimpeachable. Gulliver’s fi nal idealization of the Houyhnhnms takes the form of a fantasy of an equine revolution within Europe: “Imagine twenty Thousand of them breaking into the Midst of an European Army, confounding the Ranks, overturning the Carriages, battering the Warriors Faces into Mummy, by terrible Yerks from their hinder Hoofs.”99 Gulliver’s fi nal position is the dead end of zoontology, as a transspecies identification is mistakenly judged as insanity from an anthropocentric perspective even though it is actually a sign of Gulliver’s enlightenment. The utopian paradox meets the theriophilic one: the world, by contemplating its imperfection through comparison with a bestial alternative, is exchanged for a morally plausible truth. Swift has, therefore, written a great text of Enlightenment Orientalism, one that uses the perspective of cultural alterity taken to the limit of the anthropological and the zoontological, a position that recuperates a xenophilic strain, even as it applies the close imagination of beast fable with narratives surrounding political philosophy and state formation. If the Flying Island in Laputa was a subtle return of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the dour horses combine boredom and inertia as a hippocentric alternative to anthropocentrism.

PHILOSOPHICAL FABLES The mixture of new worlds, talking animals, and remote nations in Voltaire’s fables delivers the heady philosophical accents of an Enlightenment Orientalism that challenges national realism with the uncertainties of transcultural fable. Voltaire’s hilarious satires connect Fontenelle with La Fontaine and Swift with Fougeret de Montbron. Fictions such as Candide, Zadig, Babouc, Memnon, and La Princesse de Babylone owe their many plot twists to Mille et une nuits. Despite the incessant globetrotting of their characters, these fictions, according to René Pomeau, take place “in the same country, which is the philosophical Orient of the eighteenth century.”100 Voltaire fi nds the means to cross-fertilize biblical myth with scientific speculation and moral insight with parodic deflation. The Orient is present through multiple attributes: beast fable, monarchical absolutism, and perceptions of predestination and vicissitude, obedient to the tenets of

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

151

moral realism. Interplanetary travel juxtaposes radical novelty with timeless wisdom, as with Behn’s and Swift’s reworkings of Fontenelle. Micromégas (1752) reveals a Swiftian obsession with questions of scale, featuring gigantic space travelers from Sirius and Saturn who stop by to cut down human pretensions, as well as those of the perpetual secretary of the Académie Royale for forty-three years, Fontenelle. Like Swift, Voltaire courts burlesque extremes through delirious descriptions of measurement. Proportion signals meaning, through either magnificent presence or microscopic insignificance. Voltaire was channeling Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and also Christian Wolff’s Elementa matheseos universae (1735), a tract that entered the plurality-of-worlds debate with the obsessiveness of a projector, using complicated systems of proportionality to calculate the size of hypothetical life forms on Jupiter.101 As a result, the Sirian protagonist of the story, Micromégas, has a height of 120,000 royal feet, and his Saturnian sidekick measures 6,000 feet. Saturnians possess seventy-two senses and live fi fteen thousand years, but Sirians have almost a thousand senses and live seven hundred times longer than Saturnians. Despite a longevity that approaches that of the immortal Struldbruggs in book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, the Saturnian observes that immense life spans are still “just as good as dying immediately after being born; our existence is a point, our duration a second, and our globe an atom.”102 The titular character is the Enlightenment figure of the tale, resembling Montesquieu’s Usbek, who was also ostracized as a result of outspokenness. Micromégas is an experimental scientist driven away from the Sirian court by its “mufti.” The cleric disapproved of theologically suspect propositions Micromégas published about the common biological constitution of Sirian fleas and slugs. Choosing exile for self-edification in the manner of Usbek, the Sirian hitches a ride on the gravitational winds crossing the Milky Way. Alighting on Saturn, he meets a local one-twentieth his size and the perpetual secretary of Saturn’s Académie, “a witty man, who had actually invented nothing, but who summarized well the inventions of others, and who was passably good at small verse and large calculations” (133). This hilarious slapdown of Fontenelle continues when the Saturnian bids farewell to his brunette mistress. The two amateur scientists undertake un petit voyage philosophique to the earth, where Micromégas forces his lesser partner to eschew unwarranted deductions and desultory analogies for robust inferences based on observation (136). Fontenelle’s deductive Cartesianism is ridiculed by contrast with Lockean empiricism and inductive Newtonian science.103 The satire soon turns to flaying human pretensions. Earthlings are

152

chapter three

tiny mites invisible to the naked eye of Sirian and Saturnian alike. By sheer chance, the giants stumble upon a scientific expedition in a ship at sail in the Baltic. These travelers are swollen with opinions, given their miniscule comparative size.104 Examining their ship through an improvised microscope and interrogating the humans on board by means of an ear trumpet fashioned out of a gigantic fi ngernail, the Sirian and the Saturnian engage in a useful conversational dialogue with beings that are physically incommensurate with them.105 The small has to be judged in comparison with the big, as the protagonist’s name suggests. Hundreds of thousands are being slaughtered in the course of a war between the Turkish Sultan and a European Caesar, without any clear reason as to objective or cause, and the soldiers have never laid eyes on the respective monarchs for whom their lives are being sacrificed (144–45). The same concerns, fueled by the senseless War of the Austrian Succession, occupy several pages of Le monde comme il va (1748), where countless numbers fight and perish in a war between the Persians and the Indians with no understanding of military objectives. Why is human society so self-centered? Is the earth nothing but an anthill swarming with ridiculous assassins cutting each other’s throats? Why is there such disproportion between internal meaning and external form? We are in the realm of many such despairing and yet satirical reflections that exist throughout the heap of slaughtered bodies in that most famous philosophical tale of all, Candide, ou l’optimisme, subtitled most ironically to be sure. Voltaire’s contes philosophiques question reality, even if through nonrealist methods. The history of fiction has often confused realism with objective reality and assumed that fantastic modes yield only subjective solipsism. An interesting description of the reality-oriented objectives of fables can be found in another Voltaire tale set in ancient Egypt, Le taureau blanc (1772), where the princess Amaside, who has read Locke’s Essay and knows Petronius’s Satyricon, is in danger of execution by her father for disobedience and chides the Edenic serpent, who tells her stories that she fi nds boring and useless: I want a tale [conte] to be based on verisimilitude and not always to resemble a daydream. I would prefer that it contain nothing trivial or extravagant. Overall, I would like that, under the guise of fable, it allows discerning eyes to see a refi ned truth that escapes the common man. I’m weary of hearing of an old woman disposing of the sun and the moon at her whim, dancing mountains, rivers that flow backward, and the dead who come alive; it disgusts me especially when this non-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

153

sense is written in a bombastic and unintelligible style. You must realize that a girl who fears seeing her lover swallowed by a big fish, and having her throat cut by her own father, needs to be amused; but try to amuse me according to my taste. (583)106

Micromégas works very well according to these stated principles. In his initial conversation with the Fontenelle surrogate, the Sirian rejects any extraneous analogies or precious metaphors. It is not compelling to compare Nature to a bed of flowers, an assembly of blondes and brunettes, or a portrait gallery as Fontenelle did: Nature is like itself. When the Saturnian responds that he aimed to please the Sirian with his comparisons, Micromégas bluntly retorts: “I don’t want to be pleased . . . I want to be informed” (134). What seem like extraneous details concerning the physical proportions and potential longevity of the Sirians and Saturnians are ultimately reflections aiming to contest the naturalization of cultural and temporal expectations on earth. As Roger Pearson puts it, Voltaire “defictionalizes fiction,” bringing fantasy down to earth for instrumental application toward a philosophical goal. By doing so, Voltaire makes fiction both more and less than itself, seeking a more abstract referential outcome. As Pearson notices about Micromégas, “the central move from myth to truth, or from fantasy to fact, is endlessly repeated.”107 Voltaire parodies earlier narrative structures and philosophical tendencies known to his readers. In the manner of parody, the targeted descriptions are refunctionalized toward a comic end, deflated by a throwaway comment or a performative joke that reveals fatal contradictions within the conceptual structure under attack. When Micromégas agrees to hear several theories from the ship of philosophers about the soul, the humans reveal themselves to be in a veritable ship of fools, blundering into areas beyond their ken. Listening to followers of Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, and Locke, Micromégas is increasingly confused. The Aristotelian quotes in Greek, a language that the Sirian does not understand and that the philosopher admits not knowing very well himself. All the same, he cites Aristotle in the original because “it is better to cite what one doesn’t understand at all in a language that one knows the least” (146). Liking the Lockean the best, Micromégas and his Saturnian companion are, however, forced into choking convulsions of laughter by a dogmatic Thomist who claims that all the answers are in the Summa Theologica and that the entire universe was made for Man alone. “This inextinguishable laughter, which according to Homer is shared only by the gods,” leads to a near mishap when the ship of philosopher-fools, a mere speck of dust

154

chapter three

for the interplanetary visitors, is blown into the Saturnian’s pocket when he guffaws (147). Voltaire’s depiction of laughter as brutally leveling shares something with Henry Fielding’s notion of the comic burlesque, elaborated in the famous preface to Joseph Andrews. Floating from world to world on the gravitational force-fields that we might rename the power of fiction, Voltaire’s travelers fi nd Enlightenment Orientalism the best technique for mutual defamiliarization and close reflection. Ira Wade suggests that Micromégas is a “story of proportionate devaluation of extremes or of revaluation of means,” but the conclusion might also be pointing to a destabilizing undecidability of meaning, as the philosophical book Micromégas gives to the human beings for their edification turns out to be blank.108 By means of a brilliant rhetorical miniaturization, the last word is left to Fontenelle himself. The book is taken to the Académie in Paris for deposit, and there the perpetual secretary opens it only to retort, “I was sure that this is how it would be!” (“Je m’en étais bien douté!”—147).109 The ignorant profundities of the redacter remain. Fontenelle’s last word is a platitude about having predicted, literally, nothing. The self-aggrandizing secretary of the Académie is an emperor with no clothes. There is a good chance that Voltaire was closely influenced by Fontenelle’s De l’origine des fables (1724). In that treatise, Fontenelle theorizes that the existence of fables in different cultural contexts is evidence that human beings search for philosophical explanations of their circumstances, even if it turns out that these etiologies happen to be miraculous or absurd. Fontenelle provides a sedate exploration of euhemeristic reasoning, whereby myths are garbled accounts of historical events. Pagans, reasoned Fontenelle, gave their gods attributes that corresponded to their own human failings. As a result the gods of ancient civilizations are brutal, forceful, and crude, and it is only after some time that divinities acquire the more civilized qualities of wisdom, justice, and idealism. While Fontenelle took care to exempt the Bible, he had paved the way for Voltaire’s radical attacks on Christian miracles, especially when he combines scriptural citations with beast fable, parody, and contemporary references. The kind of Enlightenment Orientalism favored by Fontenelle and Voltaire would later turn into the recognizable discipline of comparative religion, which reasoned forward from a primitive mind and searched for scientific explanations of supernatural phenomena. This tendency culminated with significant compilations and dialogues that mark different philosophical twists and turns, including Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies religieuses (1729) and Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779).110

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

155

Le Taureau blanc, set in ancient times and a pretended translation from the Syriac, is a no-holds-barred Orientalist beast fable populated by animals from the Bible as well as Egyptian and Greek classicism. Featuring a menagerie of talking animals including the Edenic serpent, Balaam’s ass, Jonah’s whale, Tobias’s dog, the paschal ram, Elijah’s raven, and the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar himself turned into a bull, the tale is a rollicking fantasy that includes cameo appearances by prophets Daniel, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who get transformed into chattering magpies when in danger of being gored by Nebuchadnezzar, their mortal enemy. The hyperintelligent princess Amaside of Tanis is reunited with her lover Nebuchadnezzar, who has been transformed into a bull according to the biblical story, but who is then seconded into serving the living cult of Apis, the bull of the Egyptians, which just died. Helped by a sympathetic mageeunuch, Mambrès, who is thirteen hundred years old, Amaside realizes her romantic objectives despite strong paternal interdiction. The story’s logic functions through delirious religious substitutions that indicate Voltaire’s attempt to create moral equivalence among a variety of ancient religions and myths. The animals, prophets, and human beings occupy the same time, intercommunicating without any difficulty to advance a simple love story through its obstacles, and the reader is left wondering whether the princess’s desires for realism—quoted earlier—are ironic within a story replete with fantastic twists and turns. Using techniques taken from Ovid and The Arabian Nights, and adding lighthearted moral sententiousness for good measure, the fiction deliberately flouts realist protocols. Voltaire also tries his hand at pseudoethnographic satire à la turque with Le monde comme il va: Vision de Babouc écrite par lui-même (1748). The angel Ituriel requests that the Scythian Babouc visit Persepolis in order to “walk, look, listen, observe, and fear nothing as you will be well received” (95).111 Ituriel is responsible for the department of Upper Asia and needs Babouc’s intelligence in order to decide whether Persepolis ought to be destroyed for all its sins. The scene is set for an indirect social assessment of the nature of French society, as Persepolis is a thinly veiled Paris in Voltaire’s time. After some pages of excoriating criticism pertaining to the War of the Austrian Succession (portrayed as a war between Persia and India), the satire describes the excesses of Jansenist enthusiasm and the libertinism of society ladies. Justice is perverted as experienced lawyers who have spent decades studying the law plead their cases to young judges who have only a few days’ experience but whose families purchased their magistracies. After being impressed at the theater, Babouc goes backstage to fi nd out that the stage queens are actually impoverished thespians

156

chapter three

impregnated by powerful patrons. He is cheated by merchants peddling luxury items at exorbitant prices and is disappointed by the squabbling of academicians, “vermin” whom he rancorously hopes will “perish in a general destruction” (103). However, after this low point of assessment, Babouc thinks that there might be good reasons for free spirits to write tracts of dissension against ecclesiastical writs sent by the Grand Lama of Tibet. Amidst the masses of mostly useless novelists, versifiers, and theologians there exist some virtuous voices that have a way of fi nding each other. Institutions within a diverse and complex society exercise checks and balances against each other even if each one on its own is wasteful. Babouc begins to appreciate the lonely life of an aged minister, his back curved with his cares, whose waiting rooms are fi lled with the envious, the needy, and the slanderers who can only fi nd fault with ministerial actions. Furthermore, he comes to realize that mistresses and lovers may in fact be kind and may motivate their extramarital partners toward virtue. He is treated to an enlightened dinner when introduced to a foursome: a marital couple along with each spouse’s adulterous lover, all of whom get along harmoniously. Babouc realizes that if he stayed longer he could forget his assignment and fall in love with the beautiful Téone, whose character is being besmirched by vestals. Even though she is a mistress, she does more good singlehandedly than all her detractors put together (107–8). He “warms to the city whose people are polite, sweet, and well-intentioned, even if superficial, critical of others, and vain. He was anxious that Persepolis ought not to be condemned” (108). In conclusion, Babouc takes a beautiful statue, made of precious metals and stones as well as scrap, from Persepolis to Ituriel and challenges Ituriel whether it makes sense to destroy the statue just because it was not made entirely of gold and diamonds. Ituriel agrees to spare Persepolis, “letting be the world as it is, ‘because,’ as he said, ‘if everything cannot be cured, it can be endured’” (de laisser aller le monde comme il va “car,” ditil, “si tout n’est pas bien, tout est passable”; 108). Closing with appreciation instead of excoriation, Voltaire makes us wonder if Babouc is gullible or if the satirical trends of Enlightenment Orientalism can lead to tolerant integration rather than hypercritical alienation. Zadig, ou la destinée: Histoire orientale (1747) is known as one of Voltaire’s masterpieces. Keeping the ideas of merit and destiny front and center, the tale functions as a picaresque of social position, whereby happiness (that great eighteenth-century trope that has never been fully dissected by subsequent periods) is fleeting and mishap strikes without any warn-

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

157

ing because of cupidity, jealousy, or stupidity. Neither logic nor creativity is prevalent in the court culture of the sultan Moabdar, where maximal punishments are senselessly imposed. Yet Voltaire’s dedication to Sultane Sheraa (Madame de Pompadour) argues (contrary to the just-discussed assertions in favor of realism by the princess Amaside) that tales without logic that signify nothing are highly desirable. There is a profound irony in Zadig’s obedience to traditions such as that of flattering royalty, despite what are depicted as his razor-sharp deductive powers and incisive moral insight concerning the duplicity and the cravenness of others. Zadig’s Babylon is a world of arbitrary outcomes without moral reciprocity or scientific reason. Social convention militates against the logical reorganization of cultural and religious mores. Zadig, a perpetual diplomat, transcends most petty divisions by disarming controversies of their meaning. Yet he is hampered by his own ego and frequent recourse to self-pity. If there are obvious ironies concerning the foolishness of religious conventions and arbitrary rule (the “Oriental” residue), the fiction also features subtler questionings of the self-orientation of scientific (read “Occidental”) reason based on Fontenellian cosmological realism. For instance, Zadig is found by his critics to be “ ‘dry and without genius . . . [as] he can’t roll back the sea, bring down the stars, or make the sun melt like wax: he totally lacks the high Oriental style.’ Zadig was contented with possessing the style of reason” (45).112 Allowing the professions and the arts to flourish, Zadig is no despot but the harbinger of enlightenment in a Babylonian context. He prevents religious fanatics from oppressing others and enables freedom of worship. Zadig’s meteoric rise has to meet with a fall, which happens when he and the queen Astarté fall in love with each other and each has to escape separately to avoid the murderous jealousy of Moabdar. Within the context of social satire, it is hard to understand Zadig’s gratuitous misogyny. The early chapters are indebted to Petronius, with episodes that resemble the famous tale of the Ephesian matron that vilifies the irrepressible sexual passions and the status seeking of women. Zadig runs afoul of two wives, Sémira and Azora, both of whom are impatient for security and social promotion. Yet Zadig adopts dubious tactics for their humiliation based on entrapment. Zadig’s misogyny does not necessarily earn him moral stature; it leaves him romantically single and professionally aspirant. His sorrow arises from superior merit: poetic justice cannot exist in the world, as causal structures allow certain evils to be direct consequences of previous good. Zadig “has to abandon himself to the flux and reflux of sublime philosophy and heart-rending sorrow” (51). The ultimate version of this irony is revealed when Zadig travels with a hermit who

158

chapter three

systematically dispenses evil for good and vice versa to the point of committing multiple crimes of theft, arson, and murder, whereupon the hermit is revealed as the Zoroastrian angel Jesrad, who demonstrates that his actions arose from the celestial perspective of knowing the future. Jesrad delivers himself of a Voltairean deism that speaks of a Fontenellized cosmos in which “the Supreme Being . . . has created millions of worlds none of which resemble any other” (82). Yet the parallel lines of cosmic science and divine predestination meet: “there is no element of luck: everything [Man experiences] is a testing, a punishment, a reward, or a prediction” (83). Still, if Zadig’s happiness is cursed, his intellectual superiority always renders him didactic advantage, even impressing his master Sétoc with his scientific knowledge when sold into slavery, and being declared “the benefactor of Arabia” by managing to influence its tribes to abandon the practice of sati or widow sacrifice, presumably borrowed from India (58). Almona, the widow Zadig saves from the funeral pyre, entraps the four priests who were plotting to take revenge on him for putting an end to a practice that was lucrative business. Religion is priestcraft, and clerics of any kind—whether Hindu, Muslim, Zoroastrian, or Catholic—are steeped in simony and debauchery. Voltaire’s insight is identical with Bernard’s and Picart’s. Animals enter as plot elements in this story, if not as full-blown characters: Zadig is in danger of being fi ned for having stolen the queen’s bitch and the king’s horse because he reveals deductive knowledge about their whereabouts to those searching for them: “it was sometimes dangerous to be too knowledgeable” (37). Even imaginary animals pose hard doctrinal problems: Zadig has to mediate a sectarian controversy among the Zoroastrians as to whether griffins exist, as there is a religious prohibition against eating griffins. Yet animals can be saviors as well—the royal parrot fi nds the missing half of Zadig’s complimentary verses to the king, and these save him from execution for seditious utterances on the basis of mistaken meanings inferred from the fi rst half. The animal stories take a parodic twist when Zadig referees religious disputes between an Egyptian, an Indian, a Chaldean, a Chinese, a Greek, and a Celt. The Chinese appears to be the mouthpiece of Voltairean rational deism, while the Indian counsels the Egyptian not to eat chicken as he might be eating his reincarnated aunt, and the Chaldean sings the virtues of his culture’s divinity, worshiped in the form of the fish Oannès. Zadig fi nally rediscovers his love, the disgraced queen Astarté, imprisoned in a harem to search for basilisks, to cure the lord Ogul with a nonsensical prescription calling for basilisks caught by women and cooked in rose water. And as Voltaire will quip at

Discoveries of New Worlds, Talking Animals, and Remote Nations

159

the end of Le monde comme il va with an animal joke, Babouc didn’t seek to destroy Persepolis as Jonah wanted to destroy Nineveh, “but if one had spent three days in the belly of a whale, one would not be in as good a mood as when one could have been to the opera, the theater, and having dined with good company” (108). Equanimity trumps ill temperament. A fiction that appears to put so much faith in rational science actually ends with a medieval twist when Zadig goes to the lists in order to gain the hand of Astarté and the kingdom of Babylon. Having honestly won the tourney, Zadig oversleeps and then has to face the cunning of a defeated rival who has stolen his white armor and impersonates the winner. Zadig prevails after answering a series of riddles that are posed to reconfi rm the victor’s identity. The figuration of Zadig falling asleep on the verge of success is a sign of how oblivion and Enlightenment go hand in hand within the context of fictional Orientalism. The conclusion to the tale is profoundly antiteleological even if it counts as a “happy ending.” Optimistic outcomes are the result of both moral luck and philosophical merit. If this can be generalizable, it will lead to the realization that nothing much separates Orient from Occident. The indirection of the fable reveals that the categories traversed alter perspectival trajectories. Fiction comes of age through transgeneric experimentation. From human to beast and from the interplanetary to the microscopic, Enlightenment Orientalism generates a space for conjectural reflection and open-ended thought-experiment beyond verifiable realist sociology.

ch apter four

Libertine Orientalism: Prévost, Crébillon, Diderot

Our problem is to know what marvelous ring confers a similar power on us, and on which master’s fi nger it has been placed; what game of power it makes possible or presupposes, and how it is that each one of us has become a sort of attentive and imprudent sultan with respect to his own sex and that of others. —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1976)

B

y breaking down the nationalist fi rewall between fictional subgenres, Enlightenment Orientalism features fluidity and license. As Montesquieu already demonstrated in Lettres persanes, the family is the potential and actual site of despotism; his Orientalist account of government is inherited from Aristotelian political theory. Libertinism’s vocabulary of sexual license and atheism is another line of inquiry to explore. Orientalism, rather than being just about ornamentation, involves experimental depictions of sexuality. Cultural comparison focuses on differences of sexual practice and also religio-moral sensibility. The argument between morality and sexuality is also, ultimately, a discovery of the abstraction concerning “natural religion” that David Hume discussed later in the century.1 Is religion true morality or a mechanism of imposture on a gullible public? The question posed by early versions of Enlightenment comparative religion is not dissimilar to the questions raised by domestic and exotic fiction. Whose belief system is credible and why? Whose realism? When narrators tell stories about themselves, which aspects of these stories are readers inclined to believe and what do they disregard? And when narrators tell stories about cultural others, are moral evaluations a function of familiarity, or does relativist denaturalization demonstrate the fragility of cultural foundations? 160

Libertine Orientalism

161

Books such as Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–43) created an early Enlightenment hope for syncretism and religious universalism, corresponding to the philo-Orientalism discussed in my introduction. Hugely influential, the book’s erudite and ethnographic approach was accompanied by around three thousand pages of folio text compiled by Jean-Frédéric Bernard and 250 high-quality engravings created by the workshop of the celebrated engraver Bernard Picart. The book leveled religions in relation to each other, comparing doctrines and theologies as well as irrational customs and beliefs across traditions. As the title of the compendium suggested, the religions of the world were shown to be anchored by group rituals and bodily practices discovered through ethnographic observation. Different sects were treated with a spirit of comparative religion avant la lettre, even as non-Abrahamic religions were treated with curiosity and subjected to sympathetic analysis. An understanding of native American religion could come from seeing how Greek polytheism worked and vice versa.2 Religious imposture by intermediaries—priests, shamans, and witch doctors—was singled out for exposure, more so than alien gods or rival prophets. As did Fontenelle in De l’origine des fables (1724), Bernard favored euhemeristic explanations of religious mythologies; however, he took the monogenetic route, while Fontenelle took a polygenist one toward the natural history of religion, later also favored by David Hume. 3 Drawing on a fascination with Hermetic and Islamic traditions also shared by predecessors such as Guillaume Postel and Edward Pococke, Cérémonies was alleged to have had Spinozistic allegiances and put on the Roman Catholic Index in 1738 and 1757. Cérémonies was linked with the heretical Spinozistic tract Traité des trois imposteurs (1719), which argued that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad exploited the credulity of their followers. Montesquieu, for instance, was clearly influenced by the criticism of religious imposture and earlier critical writings by Bernard. Through the impetus of texts such as Trois imposteurs and Cérémonies, the interrelationship among ideas of religious imposture, philosophical atheism, and sexual libertinism developed through the fictional mechanisms made available by the oriental tale, a genre that could ridicule religion while operating under deniability.4 To discuss multiple religions through crosscultural comparison would eventually lead to religion’s privatization. Not wanting to credit Cérémonies with the invention of comparative religion, as that would be an anachronistic perception, the French philosopher Jacques Revel argues that its editors used comparison as an argumentative device rather than as a scientific instrument.5 All the same, the modus

162

chapter four

operandi of implicit argumentation is precisely how Enlightenment Orientalism made an impact through fictions such as Lettres persanes, not so much by inventing a full-fledged disciplinary epistemology with protocols of evidence as through satirical denunciation that queried faraway customs as well as familiar prejudices. Cross-cultural juxtaposition stimulated an alienation effect, suggesting the reframing of existing truths. Fiction was a catalyst but not yet a methodology, a scattershot device leading to plural outcomes rather than a defensible discipline with a singular objective. Many eighteenth-century attacks on Islam repeated the medieval Christian depictions of Muhammad as an impostor, reminiscent of the way Protestant schismatics had rejected the pope as the Antichrist. Some Enlightenment denunciations of Islam by Voltaire and others continued the idea of religion as an imposition. The renewal of Christian faith by Puritanism and Methodism was in the context of vast challenges to belief by scientific investigation and also developing urban mores that escaped or ignored communitarian judgments. Meanwhile, some Spinozistic observers suggested that Islam was the purest form of Protestantism.6 The notions of imposture and fable brought up to debunk religion are connected with the Orient, but as religion (including especially Catholicism) is attacked as falsehood, space is also cleared for internally oriented skeptical fictions. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s “Japanese” story L’Écumoire (1734; The Skimmer, or The History of Tanzaï et Néadarné), published in “Peking,” features a secular denunciation of religion (see fig. 4.1). In grandiose Orientalist fashion, the text supposedly arrives via a Dutch translation of the writings of an ancient sage, Kilo-hoéé, who lived a millennium before Confucius.7 Set in the kingdom of the now extinct Chechianians, the fiction wittily attacks the papal bull Unigenitus and the characters involved, including the cardinal Louis René Édouard de Rohan, the minister Guillaume Dubois, the archbishop Louis Antoine de Noailles, and the boy-king Louis XV. Interrogating the mutual obligations between sovereigns and high priests, the fiction explores the relationship of religion to politics as allegorized by sexual fealty. Crown Prince Tanzaï (reminiscent of Louis XV) has been cursed. A large metal handle has been attached to his genitalia, and the eponymous skimmer will detach itself only when the prince can force his high priest Saugrenutio to lick and swallow the ladle.8 At the same time, Tanzaï hopes to counteract designs made on his person by the powerful crone Concombre/Cucumber (evoking the dwarfish Duchesse du Maine), and Crown Princess Néadarné has to undergo a similar sexual trial with the genie Jonquille. Néadarné is tempted by the

Libertine Orientalism

163

Figure 4.1. Title page to Tanzaï et Néadarné, by Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (Pekin, 1740). Image courtesy of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

prospect of the affair that her husband urges her to consummate. Meanwhile, Saugrenutio makes a bid for power by manipulating oracular utterances around a great ape revered by the Chechianians. Sexual anomaly is the corporeal instantiation of theological absurdity. Libertinism insists on the denaturalization of sexuality and theology, allowing for the conceptual space that Enlightenment Orientalism needs to be able to make an impact as a thought-experiment.9

164

chapter four

Many writers of oriental tales were fully cognizant of the criticisms posed against them as fanciful and therefore preemptively incorporated the opposition. As Crébillon’s preface states, “Oriental Books are always stuff’d with Trifles and absurd Fables; the Religions of the Eastern Nations are grounded wholly on idle Tales, which they introduce on all Occasions; and which would appear as ridiculous to us, as venerable to them. These religious Extravagancies diffuse over their Compositions a fantastic Air, whose Novelty might give Pleasure, but which is now grown too common for a Reader to discover any Beauties in them” (ix–x). After airing a devastating critique in the preface, the fiction does exactly what the preface dismissed. Whose objections are the prefatory disavowals addressing? Or are these remarks exactly like those in the prefaces of Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, which fulminated against the wicked immoralities of the protagonist, whose lascivious life is then recounted in meticulous detail? While the pleasures of the fiction are excused by the preface, the excesses of the fiction also retroactively undermine the preface’s joyless didacticism. To reiterate the argument being made in this book, the Orientalist aspects of the stories are not superfluous ornamentation, as is frequently argued, but necessarily fabulist constructions that allow the comic unfolding of politics, religion, and sexuality in relation to each other and in full-blown denaturalization. Through allegorical indirection, tenor and vehicle become thoroughly confused, and they cannot just be disambiguated by the stabilizing function of ingenious keys that reveal authorial intention. Orientalist representations under Enlightenment premises are also free-floating structures that make transcultural comparisons visible. Just because oriental tales uncover shifting epistemologies, critics have been wont to characterize these fictions as lighthearted entertainments, unlike the didactic realist novels that claim to teach morality, history, and conduct. However, what if we considered fictions of pseudoethnography as inventing generalized Enlightenment thought-experiment, whereby cultural self-knowledge proceeds from defamiliarization and the tragicomic recognition of oneself in the other? Falsehood and insight are mutually constitutive, as are realism and fantasy, as well as novel, romance, and oriental tale as different dimensions of Enlightenment Orientalism.10 This chapter discusses three brilliant writers who explore different aspects of libertinism and sexuality as they hybridize developing forms of fictional subjectivity, both Orientalist and domestic. While the 1740s have been designated as crucial for the Britannocentric “rise of the novel” debates, the popular French writers of the decade who circulated widely in

Libertine Orientalism

165

Britain through ongoing cross-Channel publication have frequently been sidelined. Many of these authors also served as translators. Delarivier Manley (discussed in chapter 5) had translated Sieur Du Plaisir’s theoretical essay on fiction as a preface to her Queen Zarah and the Zarazians in 1705; Eliza Haywood and her partner William Hatchett translated Crébillon’s Le Sopha into English in 1742; Prévost translated Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa into French, and Diderot was to eulogize Richardson later in 1762. Fielding’s romances Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), seen within the English literary tradition by Ian Watt and others as counterpoints to Richardson, also circulated on the Continent as satire with a broad comic vision. These multiple lines of fl ight complicate the debates between libertinism and virtue in the period, especially when inflected by way of Orientalist defamiliarization. My selective appraisal of three 1740s fictions will alternate between featuring intriguing failure and commercial success: Abbé Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne (Story of a Modern Greek Woman; 1740), Claude-Jolyot Crébillon’s Le Sopha (The Sopha; 1742) and Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels; 1748) are put in dialogue with each other to make visible the multiple outcomes of an Orientalist focus on sexuality, freedom, and alterity. By demonstrating the social inquisitiveness concerning sexuality, these fictions propose the libertine ethos as an alternative to the subjectifications provided by domestic fiction. Libertine orientalism undoes domestic subjectivity even while its status as an alternative epistemology of the transcultural is undermined by its narrative complexity.

A HERMENEUTICS OF DEFERRAL Abbé Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne presents libertine literature, roman à clef, scandal fiction, and harem erotica within a structure of intriguing psychological ambiguity.11 A negative theology of Orientalist epistemology, the fiction deals with projection, sublimation, duplicity, and psychological forms of shadow boxing, confronting a European male self with an Orientalized female other. The work is based on an earlier historical episode concerning Louis XIV’s ambassador to Constantinople from 1698 to 1710, Charles de Ferriol, Marquis d’Argental, who bought a four-year-old Circassian slave and had her brought up in France in his household. Ferriol subsequently became insane. The libertine Ferriol’s intentions were scandalous: he indicated that the child should be reared as either an adopted daughter or a future mistress—as one critic puts it, she was “a sexual pension policy destined to mature upon [Ferriol’s] retire-

166

chapter four

ment.”12 Ferriol’s ward, Charlotte-Elizabeth Aïssé, mothered a child with another French aristocrat before coming down with tuberculosis and undergoing a spiritual conversion. She eventually retired to a convent and died shortly thereafter.13 Prévost converts the scandalous elements of the incident into a lyrical reflection on the hermeneutics of the cultural encounter as well as the dynamics of domination and deception. Using sophisticated techniques such as an unreliable narrator and overlaps of intradiegetic and extradiegetic narration, Prévost invents a brooding fiction about sexual, cultural, and moral confl ict. The entire story is told by an unnamed French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, obsessed with Théophé, the contemporary Greek of the novel’s title. Already a sixteen-year-old concubine in a Turkish harem, Zara—who renames herself Théophé, meaning “she who loves the gods” or “she who is dear to God”—becomes his ward when the Ambassador instrumentalizes his homosocial relationships with various Ottoman nobles such as the Pasha Chériber, her erstwhile master, and another important aristocrat, the sélictar, to liberate her from the pasha’s clutches on compassionate grounds. The sélictar instantly falls in love with Zara/Théophé and pursues her through multiple intrigues for a good part of the fiction. The narrator, slow to acknowledge his own unconscious attraction to the damsel at the outset, vigorously protests his lack of desire. After overcoming initial scruples, however, the narrator proposes on the basis of his “enlightened libertinism” that Zara become his kept mistress. He is refused (134, 609). As the fiction proceeds, the Ambassador communicates his growing attachment to his pupil by jealous possessiveness whenever she tries to break free of his hospitality or communicate with other eligible men. The narrator confesses his growing passion to be enflamed by every rejection. A ferocious battle of wills ensues over several years, during which the young Greek unflinchingly proclaims her conversion to moral virtue while resisting the lovesick Ambassador and several other aspirants to her hand and bed. Part of the reason is Théophé’s philosophical attitude: “her mind, naturally inclined to meditate, grasped nothing without immediately enlarging upon it in order to consider it in all its aspects” (102, 586). The narrator is hoist on his own petard, having hypocritically preached virtue to his ward and having given her Jansenist moral materials— Nicole’s Essais and La logique de Port-Royal—for her self-improvement. As a “modern Greek woman,” Théophé represents the Orientalizing subjection of Greek culture to the Ottoman Empire and yet her unavailability as knowable sexual object. Translation is the means to render Théophé legible, but as a newly born Frenchwoman she lives out a virtuous

Libertine Orientalism

167

restraint derived from Jansenist moral ideals. As one critic suggests, Histoire d’une Grecque moderne is the most Augustinian of Prévost’s novels. If Frenchness stands for self-control and awareness, the Ottomans show up the Frenchman’s presumed superiority with respect to the monetization of virtue and the ideality of love.14 In fact, as Catherine Cusset suggests, a transition from the aristocratic to the modern subject is represented in the battle of wills between the Ambassador and his ward, here a transition from an aristocratic Frenchman to a concubine of Greek origin liberated from an Ottoman harem. The fictional representative of modernity is an indigenous Orthodox Christian woman, initially forced to live according to Ottoman mores and then “rescued” into the strictures of French Jansenism. Is Théophé Greek, Turkish, French, or none of the above, an idiosyncratic category-crosser who undermines all attempts to apprehend her epistemologically? In many ways, she is the hybrid subject of Enlightenment Orientalism par excellence.15 Periodically expressing gratitude for her rescue with effusive thankyous and spontaneous phrases and gestures that signal her “Oriental” origins to the French reader, Théophé nevertheless feels increasingly entrapped by the narrator’s possessiveness during years of ambivalent communication marred by bouts of jealousy. She begs to be allowed to join a convent to escape his clutches, a request that is cruelly refused. Her debt to the Ambassador cannot be repaid, while his expectations are increasingly untenable. Her only repayment is to tell her story, following the story-asransom structure familiar to eighteenth-century readers of several story cycles in The Arabian Nights.16 The last paragraph of the novel reveals that Théophé has died from an illness and the ailing Ambassador is still burning with doubts about whether she had been secretly licentious with other men. The French diplomat’s hermeneutic vertigo terminates in a literary version of senile dementia.17 Readers are asked to judge the truth of Théophé’s transformation over the course of the narrative, and the increasingly querulous diplomat imputes her treachery at the beginning and the end without being able to provide credible proof. Introduced to Zara (a Turkish name assumed for the purposes of concubinage) by his friend Chériber, then pasha of Egypt, the Ambassador is initially indifferent to her. The concubine is presented as an example within a cultural contest regarding the relative status and treatment of women in French and Turkish societies. Within this context, the Ambassador considers the absence of male banter about the female sex as a defect, unlike the norm prevalent in French male society: “I pitied [Ottoman male aristocrats] for denying themselves, through an excess of jealousy or through

168

chapter four

a defect of taste, the most agreeable subject that can fuel [puisse échauffer] a conversation” (57, 555). As in Montesquieu, Enlightenment Orientalism takes a competitive turn around gendered outcomes. The urbane patter of the French libertine, eager to establish European cultural superiority over Ottoman customs, fi nds its mark when Zara takes his overstatement at face value. She declares him to be “her liberator, her father, and her God” (71, 565). Is this a sign of gullibility, repeated whenever the self-reinvented Théophé needs to express a symbolic loyalty to her new patron, or is it a brilliant strategy of oneupwomanship that keeps the diplomat perpetually at bay? Zara’s past reality involved subservience and cynicism, for which she had learned two principles. One was that men were the only source of women’s fortune and happiness. The second was that “using our [women’s] desire to please [notre complaisance], our submissiveness, and our caresses, we could acquire a sort of dominance [une espèce d’empire] over [men]” (80, 571). After she has been convinced of the possibility of women’s sexual agency and has taken the Frenchman’s offer and claim literally, there is no looking back. The diplomat is forced to acknowledge that he had not “thought of inspiring her with discretion” but that her intelligence was “only the happy effect of her character, sparked by some remarks [he] had uttered accidentally” (140, 613). Furthermore, the Ambassador inadvertently undermines himself with the Jansenist reading selections. He also considers providing her the highly chivalrous romances Cléopâtre and La Princesse de Clèves but in the end does not (207, 658). The Ambassador concludes that a successful seduction based on fiction reading would be a hollow victory: “Will I fi ll her imagination with a thousand chimeras from which her reason can gather no fruit? Supposing she takes some tender sentiments from them, will I be well satisfied to owe them to fictions, which can awaken the sentiments of nature in a heart naturally disposed to tenderness, but which will not make the happiness of mine, if I owe them only to my artifice?” (207, 658). Fiction elicits suspicion and is eschewed altogether as a source of moral emulation. This reflects a conservative Jansenist view, just as much as the equivalent position taken by several British moralists. The Ambassador wants a purely libertine seduction, eliciting Théophé’s natural desires rather than artificial longings stimulated by fiction. Against the myths of Pygmalion and Don Juan implied within the Ambassador’s narrative about the beautiful woman fashioned for male delectation, Théophé fashions herself in the tradition of heroines who refuse suitors while constantly keeping them on the brink, like Penelope and the Princess of Clèves.18 The diplomat’s ulterior motives are thoroughly undermined by his earlier moral hypocrisy,

Libertine Orientalism

169

ultimately leading to his bitter and intemperate accusations concerning her duplicity. Prévost demonstrates that unreflective Orientalism is about pure projection on the other; its reflexive consequence is something we recognize as Enlightenment Orientalism. The incipient problems of passage from Turkey to France are exacerbated by the written word. Translation deceives as well as enables—traduttore, traditore! While the narrator and his interlocutor communicate in Turkish in the harem (the ambassador claiming that his Turkish is as good as that of a native speaker), she later writes to him of her hopes to escape in Greek, a language that he is studying but does not yet comprehend fully (61, 558). Thus several of the narrator’s initial transactions with Théophé take place through the mediation of his language tutor (maître de langues), leading to deceptions, misunderstandings, and an escape plot that he manages to prevent. The ubiquity of the language tutor as mediator in the fi rst half of the novel invests the pitfalls of linguistic communication with metaphysical significance. According to Alan J. Singerman, editor of the critical edition, the novel is replete with doubles and foils that further complicate the principal metaphysical confl ict that unfolds between the young Greek and her older French patron. In addition to the sélictar’s persistent plotting in the fi rst part, which concludes with the categorical rejection of a romantic outcome for the near future, two subplots intensify the narrative. One of these involves the aspirations of a young Greek, Synèse, who is likely Théophé’s brother.19 The other subplot features a romantic complication between a Sicilian lady and a knight of Malta who place themselves under Théophé’s protection, also inversely mirroring other aspects of the central intrigue.20 All the frenetic action involving the subplots peters out, returning us to the unresolved intrigue between the Frenchman and the Greek beauty. The fiction reveals the paradoxical intersection of French libertinism and Turkish sexual mores, working through a logic of homosocial exchange as well as the unreturnable gift of freedom offered by the Ambassador to Zara/Théophé. There is not much that separates Chériber, the sélictar, the various counts, the unnamed French aristocrats, and for that matter Synèse, from the diplomat in their common heterosexual desire for the Greek beauty, even as they work out their rivalries with each other according to differing rules of engagement: for example, the diplomat intervenes to protect the sélictar from potential execution by the sultan at the height of their rivalry. All such maneuvers are revealed as bargaining positions intended to subsume the agency of the woman that they all claim to support. Male heterosexual drives are masked by offering female love

170

chapter four

objects the blandishments of physical security, prosperity, and the power to rule over others, benefits that these men offer to a defenseless escapee whose only assets are her desirability, constantly enhanced by the power of refusal. The diplomat’s initial gambit is the promise of enhanced female status in Christian Europe to negotiate a sexual contract with Théophé. The sélictar has much more power and property to offer Théophé than the Frenchman, but he is refused on the grounds that the diplomat allows her the freedom to stay with him even while she is romantically undecided about him or anyone else. In constantly postponing the time of decision from months to years, Théophé strings out her subjectivity into an aporia. Often the diplomat cannot figure out whether her answers to his propositions are consent or refusal (124, 602). This mistake is also made by other characters, who systematically misread Théophé’s neutrality and indifference for assent to their plans involving her, only to be surprised by her categorical refusal when she is asked to participate, as for instance when Synèse and the Maltese knight conspire to abduct her “even though they were quite far from having obtained her consent” (200, 653). Even her initial desire to escape is presented as purely philosophical: “to seek in Europe a situation that corresponded to her ideas” (139, 613). Théophé prefers her metaphysical condition of being to involve not choosing anything significant, thereby threatening, by her sexual indifference, the subjectivity of all those around her including the various chaperones, duennas, language tutors, social companions, and sexual suitors who keep attempting unsuccessfully to maneuver her into a fi xed position of relationality and exclusivity. Subjectivity is constantly under threat of erasure. A countergift expected, but not given by her, pertains to the erotic reciprocation of the Ambassador’s affections. Gratitude expressed through eros is a contradiction in terms that Théophé cannot countenance; eventually the Ambassador cancels his earlier gift by crassness and paranoia, revealing his gift as symbolic violence.21 Théophé’s desire for freedom is pure Enlightenment without content, as desired by the Orientalist subject. Théophé’s fi nal request, ignored by the Ambassador, is for total withdrawal into an all-female space: “ ‘[A] convent,’ she said in a voice muffled by her tears, ‘a convent is the only lot [le seul partage] remaining to me, and the only one that I desire’ “ (290, 716). The French term partage suggests both division and reunification, a gender separatism that hives Théophé off from the opposite sex but also promises to heal her. But the possibility of separatist gender utopianism as the sole refuge from libertine violence and anxiety remains off limits. Perhaps it is yet another chimera

Libertine Orientalism

171

like the harem, whose phantasmatic presence is the originary state from which Théophé is plucked, and in relation to which French libertinism is a particular kind of individual adventure. The libertinism of the diplomat can never aspire to the systemic level of polygamy that his Turkish peers have created. French libertinism becomes the shadow alternative to the social structure of the harem. This is a thought-experiment with analogical significance for both “sides” of the East-West divide. Yet what is under investigation is not some radical alterity but a comparative analysis of different ways of reconfiguring the self, choosing among “French,” “Greek,” and “Turkish.” Her relationality perpetually under play, Théophé becomes a metaphor for an indeterminacy that is moral, sexual, and cultural at once. Her frequent refusals make for the negative capability in the narrative, resulting neither in a sexual conquest nor in a revelation of sexual betrayal, though both possibilities are implicitly promised. The fading away of Théophé, the eventual aging and weakness of the diplomat, and the narrative’s sudden truncation with the announcement of Théophé’s death provide an allegorical rendition of what Ernest Jones termed the aphanisis, or fading away of sexual desire, perhaps the exact opposite of Orientalism that fabricates a content-oriented blood libel against racial otherness and difference.22 The diplomat’s narrative has been subjected to an autoimmune disorder that is frequently perceived with respect to narratives of sovereignty and power. Where he can control and have his way, he claims to give his subject full freedom to choose and refuse. Yet when she does as she pleases, he jealously accuses her of bad faith, ingratitude, and cruelty. The poisoned gift of freedom is revealed to be the biggest cheat, as the gift was given with the secret intention that it be dissolved by the recipient into the reciprocal mutuality of the countergift, whereby after waiting an appropriate length of time to prove her virtue Théophé would accede to the diplomat’s sexual longings. The literal acceptance of the gift invites aggression, projection, and a paradoxical submission to the ideality of the gift itself. The diplomat is proud to report the rumors in Paris that his inordinate jealousy has led to his disfiguring his ward with a potion or that he had kidnapped her from a harem and as a result lost his job as ambassador. Given that his jealousy is indeed extreme and that he is an unreliable narrator, do these extravagant statements raise suspicions that he might be indirectly confessing to injurious and potentially murderous acts? The diplomat claims to have “remained above these fairy tales by listening to them calmly” and being “the fi rst to turn them into a joke [badinage]” (271, 702). In any case, despite his jealous rages and paranoid control of

172

chapter four

Théophé, the diplomat cannot force her acquiescence. Given the libertine penchant he claims to have had for seducing women, that would be the ultimate sign of his defeat. At points he begins to mimic his ward’s inaccessibility and passivity, aspiring for a different form of transcendence of conditional limitation and perhaps his own fading away. Enlightenment Orientalism meets a certain philosophical limit when confronted with an inscrutable object. Just as characters vanish, so do genres. The oriental tale features characters prone to vanish in a puff of smoke, whether they be genies or women in the harem. Aphanisis is contagious from the character to the genre. While most of the narrative is rendered through the diplomat’s jealous perspective, Théophé is given a crucial opportunity to represent herself when she narrates her story, which is reported verbatim. However, this inset narrative also reveals how much her story of her early life involves a remarkable degree of self-fashioning, suggesting a heightened awareness of effect from very early on, including the capacity to manipulate the trope of simplicity as well as to suppress childhood trauma. By the time she was ten, her foster father was playing a double game by arranging to make her available not just to the Ottoman noble but also to the son who was besotted with her. She was “delivered over to him at an age when [she] did not yet know the difference between the sexes,” and Théophé claims that “a taste for pleasure had no part in [her] misfortune and that [she] did not fall into licentiousness [le désordre] but was born into it. Thus, I experienced neither shame nor remorse for it” (74, 567). She experienced no desires during her early years as a sex object, as she was habituated to her fate. While the narrative quickly glosses over this initial childhood trauma, it can be seen to have a consequential impact on Théophé’s consistent shying away from sexual opportunity in later years. Reeducated in Constantinople by her foster father for disposal as a concubine, a statusconscious “Zara” rejects the prospect of being bartered to a businessman by her neighbors following her foster father’s execution. She would rather take the chance of fi nding the wealthiest aristocratic bidder by walking into the slave market, where she unveils herself, to the amazement of spectators, so that she can demonstrate that her wares are more fetching than those of the women who were just sold (83, 573). With this assumption that she can sell herself, Zara demonstrates an early aspiration for complete self-determination, though this moment is compromised by her physical hunger—she is forced to beg for food from another woman in the presence of the same spectators. Eventually, Zara is tricked into accompanying Chériber’s steward to his master’s abode.

Libertine Orientalism

173

As she explains why she liked the Ambassador’s desultory offer, Théophé’s exclamations suggest initial naiveté and supreme retroactive irony: “There is a country, then, I said, where one fi nds a happiness other than that of fortune and riches! There are men who esteem in a woman other assets than those of beauty! There are for women other merits to be valued and other possessions to obtain! But how is it that I never knew what delights me with such sweetness and seems to conform to my inclinations?” (88, 576). This statement reiterates the aspirations of agency turned into cruel promises never to be fulfi lled, whereby the desires of femaleness and the presumed Oriental subject mingle. Théophé prefaces this statement with the literal assertion that “the words virtue, honor, and conduct, for which I needed no explanation, became fi xed in my mind and they were instantly elaborated, as though they had always been familiar to me” (87, 576). Virtue is born fully armed in Théophé’s personality simply by its mention, and her intuitive grasp of it is subtractive from her own condition and sexual status as harem slave. When she can, Théophé arranges for the liberation of several other unfortunates. The Ambassador’s character features a crusading virility that accords with his libertine identity and leads to a dueling form of self-promotion. He helps organize his men to prevent a mutiny on the sea voyage back to France. Furthermore, two historical incidents that are incorporated into the fiction refer to the historical Ferriol’s excitable behavior when challenged by Ottoman customs. One, the much-discussed l’affaire de l’épée, involved Ferriol’s insistence that he could not show his credentials to the Ottoman sultan without his sword by his side, as removal of that weapon would be an insult to the authority of the French king. The ensuing standoff meant that Ferriol was denied admittance to the audience chamber. The other incident pertains to l’affaire de la fête, when Ferriol insisted on going ahead with a celebration of the birth of Louis XIV’s grandson, the duke of Bourgogne, involving fi reworks and illuminations, even though the governmental permission he had asked for and had been granted was rendered obsolete when the vizier was replaced that very morning. Unable to reconfi rm the permit with the new vizier, who was busy assuming the duties of his office, the hotheaded Ferriol commenced the celebration on the basis of an expired permit and refused to desist when ordered by the vizier’s troops. A violent contretemps was prevented by the intervention of a translator, who duped the Turks into thinking that the French festivities had ended. Incidentally, Ferriol commissioned many of the visual depictions of Islam in Turkey, by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, later to be etched by Picart for Cérémonies religieuses.23

174

chapter four

The virtue of Théophé is juxtaposed against this crusading virility of the Ambassador, whose unconventional self-possession also bespeaks a certain “masculine” form of agency. Refusing subordination by marriage or sexual contract, Théophé does fall in love once, with the Count M. Q., confessing to the Ambassador that she “felt predisposed toward him by a violent inclination,” though she decides that because of her compromised social status this attachment cannot be fulfi lled (258, 694). Other suitors, such as Monsieur de S. and another count, eventually become targets of the Ambassador’s suspicion, even though it appears that they too appear to have failed to assault the impregnable wall of Théophé’s virtue. Such virtuous invincibility when faced by libertine desires arouses suspicion and leads to surveillance by jealous duennas, who run afoul of the Ambassador’s ward. Once they get to France, and once Théophé loses some of her charms as the result of an illness, and as the Ambassador himself grows infi rm, the narrative begins to turn full circle: the Ambassador’s actions begin to echo uncannily the pandering behavior of Théophé’s Greek foster father. He attempts to elicit marriage proposals for his ward from men of higher social status in France, such as M. de S. While the Ambassador assumes that Théophé will appreciate “the chance she would have to assume the rights of virtue and honor through an institution that could erase all the memories of the past from her own imagination, she replied that she felt an aversion to [l’éloignement à] the state of marriage” (269, 701). The former concubine thereby maintains an abstract relationship with the idea of libertinism if not the practice of licentiousness, as she is most interested in being socially unattached and unencumbered by the duties and responsibilities of a wife. Marriage proposals do not interest her. This blanket refusal perhaps raises the Ambassador’s suspicions that she is secretly indulging lovers. It is a combination of the philosophical aspects of libertinism with a desire for unfettered social freedom that motivates the former concubine, increasingly allowing her to win the symbolic duel. Given how much Théophé has instrumentalized heterosexuality as the principle of social organization, political control, and individual manipulation, she aspires to a renunciatory system of values that would transcend those limitations of interactivity. The most distinctive feature of this fiction is that characterological absence is found whenever the narrator wants to grasp his ward’s psychological essence. One of the most evocative scenes in the fiction illustrates this point. It takes place when the narrator steals into Théophé’s bedroom after keeping an unsuccessful nocturnal vigil, during which he had hoped to surprise his ward indulging in sexual freedoms with her then suitor, the

Libertine Orientalism

175

Count M. Q. Entering the empty room after Théophé has gone out for the entirely respectable activity of taking a morning walk with her suitor and duenna, the diplomat, still in his nightshirt, examines her unmade bed for signs of her having slept with her lover. While he conducts this jealous evidence-gathering exercise, which extends to measuring the sheets, the sight of Théophé’s imprint on the bed along with the remaining warmth and odor from her body seduces the narrator into a paroxysm of amorous longing (255, 691). He kisses the sheets where she has slept and he breathes in her odors, following which he falls asleep in the same spot—only to awaken to Théophé’s mortified embarrassment and her suitor’s abrupt departure when they return to her room. The Ambassador has taken revenge on his ward by creating an appearance of impropriety that chases away the love of her life. This episode, which takes place in Italy toward the end of the fiction, when the diplomat and Théophé are returning to France from Turkey, is an especially interesting instance of delayed selfsubversion: the diplomat had earlier prided himself on being free of curiosity and indiscretion, two social traits that are considered anathema in Turkey, but he seems to display them uncaringly now that he has left that country (58, 555). A sexual obsession predicated on the inability to possess the Oriental woman evolves into an abstract metaphysics of interpretive ambiguity, whereby the absence of evidence of sexual licentiousness combines with the existence of social interaction among the sexes to appear as living proof of perpetual impropriety. In this fiction, the Orient has become an allegory of indeterminacy in a manner that undermines the European self. However, this is not the self-consolidating self in the face of the destruction of the other that has often been remarked as a feature of Orientalism in general; rather, it is self-dissolution in the face of another who is both maximally French and Turk by way of her intermediate Greekness, and who has herself also ceased to be. The bodies disintegrate, and along with them the subjectivities that inhabit them. Or, if we can assume that the narrative contains hints that the Ambassador might have engineered Théophé’s demise, setting up a classic narrative of male misogyny and the confi nement and murder of the beautiful woman as love object, it is still at the price of the woman’s complete apotheosis and the narrator’s own abjection and failure. All things to all people, Théophé, a name that etymologically could mean “she who announces God’s desire,” could indicate a negative theology of meaning through the traits of pure indeterminacy and indifference to closure.24 We could make the case that Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) is a plain-

176

chapter four

clothes version of the oriental tale, and especially that Richardson seems conversant with Prévost’s earlier fiction. Perhaps this is a challenging irony, given that Prévost was known to be Richardson’s translator. However, this is worth a speculative aside: Clarissa forces an engagement between Lovelace’s discourse of masculine libertinism, which is indebted not just to the philosophy of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and the English Restoration but also to French fictional Orientalism. Clarissa’s ethics of feminine sensibility resonates evocatively in relation to the hermeneutics of deferral raised by Montesquieu’s and Prévost’s harem fictions. Clarissa’s reliance on Lovelace’s self-fashioning as an Oriental sultan—and also Lovelace’s charge that Clarissa is the despot in relation to his unrequited affections—is fascinating to consider especially in the wake of Prévost’s translations of Richardson, which ended up ensuring the latter’s reputation in France and on the Continent. Such a reading strategy aims to unsettle the neat distinctions that novel criticism, nationalism, and cultural theory have reified. Domesticity, the family, and Christianity are not just autochthonous structures but are reproduced in every epoch in dialogue with exoticism, estrangement, and immorality. Richardson is often seen as the great figure that inaugurates English narrative exceptionalism and justifies the suggestion of a schism between novel and romance. However distinctive Richardson’s contribution, though, it is abused when an autotelic literary history of the domestic English novel, crowned by national realism and xenophobia, replaces the plethora of earlier feminine fictions that dominated the 1720s. Furthermore, the innovations around the novel include a heightened use of fi rst-person narrative and an appropriation of historical voice rather than overblown descriptions.25 While Prévost’s novel was not a popular success in its moment, a close reading gives evidence that it represented a singularly prescient innovation in its time, indicating that Enlightenment Orientalism was also practiced in ways that did not always achieve popular success but that were nonetheless aesthetically remarkable.

LANGUOROUS LIBERTINISM Ambiguity and indirection are features of Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne. Crébillon fi ls is also renowned for subtle feints of boudoir banter and multiple aspects of “amphiboly, double meaning, equivocation, enigma, uncertainty, and obscurity.”26 Le Sopha: Conte moral / The Sopha: A Moral Tale inaugurates a sophisticated version of Enlightenment Orientalism in conversation with Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights.

Libertine Orientalism

177

Translated almost immediately into English by Eliza Haywood and her partner William Hatchett, The Sopha saw great success on both sides of the Channel, though it subsequently has fallen by the wayside because of the marginalization of the oriental tale.27 Capitalizing on the success of Jean-François Melon’s allegory of enlightened despotism Mahmoud le Gaznévide (1729) Crébillon’s publisher claims that the text was fi rst published at Gaznah in the year of the Hegirah 1120 (the equivalent of 1708 CE) for “the thrice-reverend, thrice-clement, and thrice-august Sultan of the Indies.”28 Three discourses come together to allow Crébillon to experiment with Enlightenment Orientalism in a fictional scenario of amorous tale-telling: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertinism as philosophical investigation, social satire, and also sexual practice; metaphysical speculations around the body and soul that synthesize metempsychosis and metamorphosis from Pythagorean, Platonic, Ovidian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim sources; and disruptive desires for a moral love superseding the cynical worldliness and social corruption often identified with court society. Could the perils of libertinism be solved by reincarnation and lead to true love? Taking its cue from the metafictional frame tale of The Arabian Nights, this fiction features an indolent prince named Schah-Baham, ruler of India, grandson of the mythical Schahriar and Scheherezade, and an avid possessor of a menagerie of monkeys, parrots, and women. Peripheral distractions attest to a core of boredom (see fig. 4.2). Based in the Mughal capital Agra, the despot desperately seeks storytelling and conversation. Ignorant and indolent (d’une mollesse achevée), Schah-Baham is tempered by his canny Sultana, who questions his desire for stories from the perspective of a critic who bemoans the inaccuracy of fables (contes): What is a Work, (if a Tale deserves that Name) what is a Work, I say, where Probability is continually violated, and the receiv’d Mode of Thinking as [sic, is] constantly destroy’d [renversées]? It is a Work, that is built on the trivial, and the false Marvellous [faux et frivole merveilleux]; that presents you with extraordinary Beings, and the Almightiness of Fairies; that over-turns the Order of Nature and the Elements, only for the sake of creating ridiculous Objects, the mere Children of a distemper’d Brain, and which very seldom repay us for the Extravagance of their Creation. Happy would it be if these Wretched Compositions only took from our Wisdom; but I fear by their too lively Descriptions, so offensive to Modesty, they reach the Heart, and leave dangerous Impressions behind. (286, 1.viii–ix)29

178

chapter four

Figure 4.2. Frontispiece to part 1 of the 1749 edition of Le sopha, conte moral by Crébillon (Pekin, 1749). By permission of the British Library. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark: 1081.e.7.

Incorporating moral objections to fantastic fiction, the Sultana’s words frame the narrative with a sophisticated moral epistemology. While she is a discerning critic, her husband desires entertaining action. Impatient with analysis, Schah-Baham objects to “long-winded Morals, that give [him] the Megrim,” and he threatens to “sheath [his] Scymetar in the Heart of the fi rst, who shall dare to make a Reflection in my Presence” (300, 1.35).

Libertine Orientalism

179

The power to narrate is granted to a young Hindu courtier, Amanzéï, cursed by the god Brahma for his licentiousness to assume the form of a sofa until he could witness a reciprocated sexual act motivated by true love. While this condition is a pretext for the serial narration of sexual adventures that will end with Amanzéï’s successful release from his upholstered incarnation, it is also a way into the psychological dynamics of sexual voyeurism, in which the witness is an inanimate object, indeed the very couch on which the sexual encounter takes place. The narrator is the bedrock of fictional variation—an apt metafictional trope. As the soul in the settee, if not quite the ghost in the machine, the narrator is neutral witness and retrospective moralist, reminiscent of other texts including Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Marana’s The Turkish Spy. The metafictional frame is a satirical commentary with gendered implications, given that Schah-Baham is at one end of the spectrum of discernment and his Sultana at the other. Perpetually bored and challenged by the moral analysis of sexual situations, Schah-Baham serves as a narrative foil, representing the naive reader, whereas the Sultana stands for a discriminating position that can translate the meanings of fiction into social life. The reader encounters a series of libertine episodes that ascend in order of complexity, proceeding through dialogical spirals that circle around desire, disingenuousness, and sexual betrayal. The fi rst involves Fatmé, an ordinarily lustful lady who reads erotic romances when unobserved and who is prone to receiving sexual services from her slave Massoud, “a frightful, mishapen Negro” (1.60). Massoud is a racial parable directly borrowed from the frame tale of The Arabian Nights, where the black slave’s cavorting with Schahriar’s harem initially provoked the murderous injunction to execute every subsequent wife on her wedding night. 30 Mimicking the outcome in the source fiction, Fatmé is caught in flagrante delicto during a tryst with a Brahmin lover and is killed by her jealous husband. Another episode involves a dancing girl, Amine, patronized by a government official, Abdalathif, who throws her out once he discovers her infidelities. Other episodes include Phénime and Zulma, prudish lovers who cannot consummate their sexual desires, and an older couple, Moclès and Almaïde, who sophistically agree to have sex with each other out of curiosity following the woman’s narration of an earlier sexual encounter that ended in frustration. Moclès and Almaïde abandon each other once their virginal desires are consummated (348, 1.133). The longest episode, which takes up a third of the novel, involves a complex triangulation: Mazulhim, an impotent master libertine, humili-

180

chapter four

ates and unmasks Zulica, his female antagonist, with the help of a male friend of even greater manipulative skill, Nassès. Libertinism becomes a mode of interrogation for the sexual subject even as the performative nature of sexual dialogue takes the reader in the direction of new forms of idealism. The subtle dialogical interruptions that intersperse the narrations ensure that discourses of sexuality get their purchase through performative effects. 31 In the manner of discourses on European sexuality since the eighteenth century, as famously analyzed by Michel Foucault, attitudes, formations, and dispositions take privilege over sexual acts by defi ning subjectivity, while romantic love masks libertine behavior. Unable to continue with this unresolved episode, Amanzéï fi nishes his narrative by witnessing a true union of hearts and bodies in the love that grows between the young lovers Zéïnis and Phéléas, which brings his deliverance from forced confi nement. However, there is something paradoxical in this witnessing, as Amanzéï has fallen in love with Zéïnis and wishes to be able to physically consummate his desire; this he cannot do, as he is an intelligence inhabiting the body of a sofa rather than that of a man. The Sultan chides his courtier for being silly enough to fall in love when not inhabiting a male body. As voyeurism is vicarious, the disembodied witness cannot participate in lovemaking but is instead released from the sofa at the climax. With such techniques of deferral and titillation, Crébillon attracted female readers as well as male ones, even if the normative expectations appear to be masculine. 32 Libertine literature assumes that there can be surprising outcomes within normative expectations. There is a parallel exploration of the hedonistic sophistication that the libertine can gain from a fi ne calibration of pleasure and of ascetic withdrawal after satiation, which takes the libertine to a different philosophical register from which mortality can be contemplated in a detached way. Naturalism meets idealism as excess becomes a paradoxical pretext for transcendence. Moving from the immoral to the amoral to the supramoral, the libertine as sexual entrepreneur is philosopher and visionary. Crébillon’s best-known fiction, Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit / The Wayward Head and Heart explores these libertine logics through the concept of waywardness (égarement). The divagations of pleasure create novel permutations and combinations for reflection on how human behavior constellates similarity with difference when it comes to sexual mores and erotic techniques to elicit and receive pleasure. Pierre Saint-Amand’s subtle reading of The Wayward Heart reveals the oscillation of the seducer’s desire, which wavers from an infantile narcissism seeking maternal

Libertine Orientalism

181

substitutes to mimetic desire for the masculine conquest of female flesh. 33 The seducer’s ego cannot ever fully resolve this back-and-forth from infantile security to licentious risk. Incest eventually becomes the territory where many libertine writers from Casanova to Sade hybridize this contest, bringing difference within familiarity. By exploding social conventions but at the same time maintaining the libertine’s psychological security, the fictions bring the waywardness of sex back into family recognition—where spice is nice, but incest is best. Orientalist libertinism, under the capacious figurative umbrella of The Arabian Nights, uses the frame tale to combine familiarity and insecurity (because Scheherezade, Schah-Baham’s grandmother, is the maternal fount even while permanently under sentence of death). At the same time, paternal substitutes, from Schahriar to Schah-Baham, are aspiring libertines without the courage to transgress the familial relation. Schahriar’s repeated postponement of Scheherezade’s scheduled execution—because the previous night’s story is unfi nished—can be related to the child’s desire for (grand)maternal succor and tenderness, where storytelling always supplements the nonnarrative experience of sexual release. Schah-Baham’s boredom demonstrates his infantile narcissism, which Lacan called “His Majesty the Ego”—around whom the world is centered, but who does not make much effort other than occasionally declaring tedium. The Oriental despot as a type could never have advanced enough psychologically for his narcissism to be characterized as regressive. Schah-Baham is always in the quest for “his darling Tales, those constant Objects of his Wonder and Veneration” (1.v). All the same, the separation of fictional levels through this structure allows dialogical reflection to connect incidents and underlying morals. Crébillon skillfully manages a double time structure, as narrated stories are interspersed with interjections. There is a continuous interweaving of discussion and narration or dialogue and action—as Hatchett’s translation puts it chiastically, Schahriar “took so much Delight in strangling his Wives, and in hearing of Tales” (1.i). Telling tales is associated with a double movement of embroidery (or pinking) and cutting (or beheading) as a means to arrive at social honors in the mythical India of this narrative (1.vii). Within this context of Schah-Baham’s impatience with dialogue, the Sultana proposes that the conversation so displeasing to her husband “is not a useless Dissertation, but a Fact itself—a kind of Dialogue [c’est un fait . . . n’est-ce pas dialogué qu’on dit?], by which we discover Circumstances of the greatest Consequence” (400, 2:54). By interpreting dialogue as a performance, the Sultana collapses the assumed separation of story

182

chapter four

and discourse into un fait dialogué, a dialogized fact that makes stories fully reflexive. As a result, “this manner of relating things . . . gives a lively Picture of the Characters, and Humours of the Persons concerned,” even as the mind may sometimes dwell on trifles and thereby lose the main thread of the narrative (401, 2:55). The Sultana as an Enlightenment salonnière goes beyond her husband’s loyalty to her grandmother Scheherezade, who tells tales with a minimal use of metadiscourse. Despite Schah-Baham’s objections, the Sultana can indicate how approaching dialogue as action can help the court become a site of moral arbitration, indeed a place of critical ethnography, mediating Schah-Baham’s desire with the Sultana’s application. Amanzéï’s ability to narrate from the sofa, a past self, creates a foundational ground. Witnessing is mute and intelligent, unable to participate, yet always on the verge of desire. The libertine episodes transition the listeners of the stories through the couch that mediates conversation and seduction, on whom characters are sitting and reclining, as well as making love and having sex. Rousseau would later remark how the salonnières were Oriental despots even as their male hangers-on were the emasculated equivalents of dependent eunuchs. 34 Oriental models were not just metaphors for French society but conceptual discoveries derived from transcultural models. Ottoman and French social facts enter as data into a larger abstract system of comparative politics. Epistemological frames connect with and also comment on narrated tales and analytical exempla, making the Enlightenment aspect of Orientalism a social-scientific function while the Orientalist part of Enlightenment played a diversionary role. Thereby, the Orient becomes substance and style, model and deviation, essence and contingency, light and darkness. Listening to the twists and turns of the seduction of Almaïde by Moclès, Schah-Baham suggests that “the Relator [storyteller] must be an Ass to employ so much time in telling, what the People he speaks of, thought, with so much Velocity” (1.125). He exclaims at the tedium of such narration in the concluding sentence of the fiction: “Ah, Grandmother! . . . it was not in this Manner, you told your Tales!” (2.178). In contrast to Scheherezade’s action orientation, the psychological shifts in the character’s mind constitute the proving point of the domestic realist novel. To go back to the debate between action and character initiated by Todorov in “Narrative Men,” the high point of the Anglophone realist novel begins with Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson and ends with Henry James and James Joyce. But what if we took the Sultana’s idea about dialogue being a form of action and turned it on its head to consider whether action

Libertine Orientalism

183

could also be a form of implicit dialogue, and furthermore, a means toward the analysis of forms of subjectivity that are not necessarily dependent on interiority? As the Sultana puts it wittily, “For very good Reasons . . . those Incidents, which are only introduced to bring on a Catastrophe, for example, ought not to be affecting as the Catastrophe itself: did every thing equally move the Passions, they would by degrees lose all their Force, and we should cease to be moved at all; because the Mind cannot be always attentive—the Heart cannot support continual Agitation; and both the one and the other require some time for Relaxation” (2.11–12). Her response to narrative digression is brutally reductive but unusually witty: “one must sometimes be made dull, in order to be the better diverted” (2.12). Schah-Baham continues as a useful device to embody naive reader response amidst anecdotal elaboration in yet another oriental fiction featuring the amours of Schézadin in Crébillon’s Ah! quel conte (1751). Modern sexual metadiscourse gets stitched onto the false archaisms of the oriental tale. The sexual fables reveal pockets within the narrative, in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s explanation of the evocativeness of Herodotus’s bare-bones story of Psammenitus that I discuss in the conclusion to this book. 35 Rather than assume that the relevance of fiction comes from journalistic contemporaneity or the subjective modernity of the Newgate criminal about to be executed, the grafting of discourse onto story within a context of reception ensures the story’s ongoing relevance, just as staged theatrical productions connect the political moment of performance with a script from an earlier time. This is how dialogue becomes action and stories become an everyday affair—without needing to be founded only on realism and the encyclopedic detail of modern life. The Mazulhim-Zulica-Nassès episode demonstrates the subtle use of unstructured dialogue that expects the reader to make deductions and judgments concerning the characters. 36 The problem with the apotheosis of the eighteenth-century novel was not, of course, the very interesting results of close attention to contemporary details. The usual confusion of facts with values has occurred, as full-scale mimesis was promulgated as the only legitimate vehicle for the advancement of fiction. If all fictions, like myths, are referential projects, as Thomas Pavel argues, then we cannot countenance the equation of the fictitious with the false and just one kind of fiction with the truth. All forms of imagination are partly referential and partly fictional—and never entirely or unproblematically just one or the other. 37 While none of this referential exploration in Le Sopha comes across as sexually explicit by today’s standards, the risqué nature of the fiction got

184

chapter four

Crébillon into trouble with Madame de Pompadour (who may have recognized herself in the depiction of the Sultana). The author’s defense was that the fiction had been composed in private for Frederick the Great several years earlier but had been leaked to the printer. A later Crébillonian fiction that purports to expose Louis XV’s sex life through an Orientalist framework with straightforward anagrams in the manner of scandal fiction was Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofi rans (1746). 38 Despite the euphemistic presence of the somatic angle of sex in Le sopha compared to many bolder examples of eighteenth-century erotica, the libertine implications of Orientalist metafiction were disconcerting, not just for their supposed immorality, which was an issue in Britain more than in France, but also for the critique of aristocratic social mores, which exposed scandal in high society to the prurient regard of developing public opinion. The sexual transgressions of the social elite always intrigue others. In an era of expanding print culture subjected to state control and censorship, one might very well think that the oriental tale was a form of generic natural selection, mimicking differences and masking similarities while claiming to expose the sexual predations of the elite as indicative of moral corruption. This age-old bait-and-switch is not the exclusive privilege of AngloAmerican Puritanism alone. Going to jail for L’Écumoire and being sentenced to exile for Le sopha, Crébillon was given the best proof that his fiction attacked real-world figures even if its mode was not realist. It might be argued that scandal fiction falls short of the truly realist novel that works with simulational types rather than historical identities, but that matter is addressed more fully in chapter 5. The Mazulhim-Zulica-Nassès episode is the nadir of libertine cruelty made visible, in which two men conspire to destroy a society woman who has judged one of them to be impotent. Going beyond the desultory idea of goût, or taste, and the libertine behavior of seduction amidst boredom, the destruction of Zulica’s self-confidence through entrapment and subterfuge is the true dead end of this fiction, which anticipates the Richardsonian and even the Sadean libertine’s power games that exult in the destruction of the victim’s self. Mazulhim evokes the Duc de Richelieu, who was reputed to be impotent while notorious for his many sexual conquests. Mazulhim is a precursor for other famous libertines, including Lovelace and Valmont, while Nassès may suggest Richelieu’s brother the Duc de Nivernais. 39 Advanced libertinism is unmasked in this lengthy episode full of psychological jousting. Dissimulation by sexual rivals occurs alongside further dissimulation by the unmasking self. Playing the game of winner-

Libertine Orientalism

185

takes-all within the sexual double standard, the male libertine triumphs while humiliating women who betray his social status through gossip.40 Libertinism succeeds through a system of material supports, including the availability of a hideaway for sexual trysts (une petite maison), ornamented with luxurious erotica and the right furniture. This space could be the scene for a secret rendezvous or the site for seduction and rape, as would notoriously happen with Clarissa in Bedford Square. Crébillon’s eponymous sofa is a metonym for Orientalized hedonism, fueled by new forms of consumption and bolstered by luxury goods imported from the East. William Hogarth depicts a copy of The Sopha lying next to Counsellor Silvertongue in the fourth plate of Marriage à la Mode: its presence can be taken as shorthand for hedonistic dalliances on day-beds, documented throughout this fiction and other satirical works such as The Rake’s Progress (see also fig. 4.4). A turn to the cultural significance of material goods in recent eighteenth-century criticism has emphasized how, according to Mimi Hellman, “perceptual and cognitive faculties might lurk unsuspecting beneath the inanimate surfaces of domestic adornments.”41 Crébillon’s fiction, as she says, “introduces the notion of a piece of furniture as a social actor.” The Orientalism of the sofa is not only about the circulation of narrative and other cultural forms but also the introduction of bodily experiences derived from foreign cultures. Furniture facilitates but also monitors social activities, providing new bodily postures and actions constraining and orienting them. As prosthetic devices, these material objects create new experiences of style, leisure, and self-fashioning. Discussing these new “hybrids between the bed and the chair,” Madeleine Dobie has identified how the significant Orientalization of furniture—whether as divan, ottoman, or turquoise—created new forms of femininity, sexuality, and sociability and also separated true sophisticates, comfortable in the world of refi ned furniture, from members of the lower echelons, who were less discerning about learned forms of pleasure.42 The plush canapés of eighteenthcentury French salons spawned an entire culture of social emulation, allowing intimate conversation and sexual seduction. Hierarchical distinctions between the drawing room and the bedroom were undermined, and functional spaces such as the boudoir, the salon, and the cabinet were reconfigured to accommodate furnishings ornamented with Turkish, Chinese, and Indian patterns. These adornments sometimes create the mistaken impression that Orientalism was largely about style and fashion; however, fictions such as The Sopha resolutely interweave accessorial

186

chapter four

style with psychological substance and fabulistic narration with libertine aspiration. Signifying consumerism, comfort, and commodiousness, sofas created a feeling of intimacy but also sociocultural aspiration.43 Crébillon’s focus on metempsychosis brings a different philosophical strain into view. If souls could fl it around from human to animate to inanimate forms, Orientalist fable becomes a vehicle for anthropomorphisms that interconnect the human, the animal, and the inanimate. The transmigration of souls was an ongoing early eighteenth-century theme for commentators on both sides of the Channel, especially in relation to garbled accounts of Chinese and Hindu theologies.44 The Arabian Nights featured several tales involving metamorphosis from human to animal that came from a number of pagan sources, while Ovidian themes would have been foremost on the minds of European redactors and readers. By converting the Nights, with its mainly Islamic setting, into a story sequel told by a Hindu courtier, Crébillon exposes plural cultural traditions contained within that story cycle—Greek, Zoroastrian, and Hindu. Amanzéï explains that the strictures laid on him during his incarnation as a sofa by the god Brahma allowed his spirit to go from one couch to another, but eventual liberation from upholstery could not take place until he witnessed true love. Crébillon demonstrates a metaphysical side to the libertinism that Amanzéï promotes: the impermanence of corporeality expounded variously by Platonic and Pythagorean philosophies and Vedic and Buddhist metaphysics. This, according to Jean Sgard, “discreetly transforms libertine fable into a reflection on good and evil and the search for deliverance.”45 Metempsychosis, hardly present in The Arabian Nights, was prevalent elsewhere in Enlightenment Orientalism. It is featured in The Adventures of the Mandarin Fum-Hoan (1723) and is discussed by periodical essays in Addison and Steele’s The Spectator and The Tatler.46 The soul is pictured as a chameleon that acquires the passions and colors of the body that it occupies, putting the supracorporal, infracorporal, and transcorporal in free relation. Crébillon touches lightly on the debates around transmigration that had been explored by authors such as Joseph Glanvil with Lux Orientalis: or an Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages concerning the Præexistence of Souls (1662), Whitelocke Bulstrode in An Essay of Transmigration in Defence of Pythagoras, or a Discourse of Natural Philosophy (1692), and André Dacier in The Life of Pythagoras, translated by Nicholas Rowe (1707). Bulstrode had already argued that transmigration theory provided some of the best allegories for natural philosophy to use in expound-

Libertine Orientalism

187

ing similarities across difference and working out the relations between matter, mind, and divine principles. Chi-ming Yang argues that some of the interest in transmigration as an early eighteenth-century thoughtexperiment involved a desire to rescue Pythagoras from less understood forms of “gross metempsychosis” that European authors had found in Eastern sources.47 As an investigative tool for such philosophical speculation, the conte or oriental fable stands in opposition to the roman, novel, history, and other forms of fictional narration. The Sopha is a hybrid, somewhere between conte and roman even if self-advertised as conte, deftly pulling together a number of libertine and Gnostic ideas. It queries realist certainties and fulfills the experimental and antifoundational mission of Enlightenment Orientalism.

THE SCIENTIFIC TRUTH (ENLIGHTENMENT) OF SEX (ORIENTALISM) Diderot’s oriental tale, Les bijoux indiscrets / The Indiscreet Jewels, is in direct conversation with Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (1704–17), Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), and Crébillon’s Le Sopha (1742).48 Bijoux is a sustained meditation on the science of sexuality configured through a libertine framework.49 While Diderot’s novel was almost immediately translated into English as The Indiscreet Toys in 1749, it was not as celebrated as The Sopha, which had eighteen English editions between 1742 and 1801.50 Diderot’s Mangogul, the sultan of the Congo, evokes Schah-Baham and Schahriar. Having exhausted the court gossip, Mangogul resorts to a magical device to get to the heart—or the vagina—of the matter. A genie’s ring communicates authentic voices emanating from nether mouths, procuring narrative pleasure for him while sullying the reputation of many society ladies. These genital voices constitute truth telling when counterposed against diversionary stories that obfuscate actual sexual behavior. According to the genie Cucufa (whose name suggests faire cocu, or cuckolding), the ring will make the women speak “from the most honest part of them and the best instructed in the things you desire to know . . . from their jewels” (43, 354).51 While women’s upper mouths continue to traffic in social conventions, full of prevarication, digression, and deferral, the nether lips testify with an objective and empiricist discourse. Over the course of the fiction, a developing structuralist taxonomy allows a number of individual énoncés (or discursive utterances) to lead to a comparative assessment of cultures. The agency and pseudoobjectiv-

188

chapter four

ity of the female sexual organs as narrators in Bijoux make for two rival and somewhat incompatible claims. First, sex is made out to be the core experience of the female body, represented as a material site as well as a semantic archive. The body can be trusted to record the truth experienced and desired by the subject, and the marks of memory are elicited and recovered with minimal interpretation. Second, there is an important shadow claim that pursues and partly undoes the fi rst. This is the suggestion that the truth of the body bypasses, negates, and silences its “owner,” rendering the subject unreliable for an empirical investigation of revealed truth. Favoring the nether mouth and bypassing the upper mouth, empirical truth assumes that the subject emits a false speech while the body wildly attests to its sexual exploits. The false speech is contradicted by the nether mouth’s exposé of the subject’s tendency to boast. As a result, many individuals are ridiculed in public. In the context of the heterosexual intrigues of the novel’s women and the sultan’s all-too-masculine desire to hear of these exploits, both the speaking jewels and their owner-subjects are overwhelmingly gendered feminine. While the sultan—the initiator of the sexual testimony—is a despotic male, the hearers of the accounts are a mixed-gender public that listens as each female jewel speaks on cue and shames the subjectivity of its owner. Paradoxically, the “Congolese” court is a “shame” culture featuring several “shameless” women. Far from being innocuous, this empiricist demand to make sex speak is a police procedure, leading to classification, specification, and differentiation that can be put to a variety of purposes, from the innocuous to the nefarious. At the end of the second trial, multiple jewels speak at once, suggesting infi nite vaginal variety in a typology of various sexual states: “I am visited, battered, neglected, perfumed, ill-attended, bored, and so on” (53, 361). The “I” here is the vaginal entity rather than the psychological self. Mangogul is delighted in response to this litany, saying, “Society can only benefit tremendously from this duplication of faculties [organes]” (53, 362). Vaginal truth corrects preexisting social lies. Later, a desire for taxonomic variety will generate the sexual stereotypes that make particular jewel-types into their moral constructionist equivalents—“the chaste woman,” “the prude,” “the gallant,” “the voluptuary,” “the courtesan,” and “the coquette”—though Mirzoza, Mangogul’s favorite, holds out for “the affectionate woman” (99, 415). This taxonomic pleasure of classifying women is featured in the article on woman (“Femme”) in the Encyclopédie and has an ultimately bureaucratic function, as Diderot also alludes to Mangogul as Louis XV and Mirzoza as Mme. de Pompadour.52 Deliberating on the extraordinary nature of Diderot’s Orientalist sex-

Libertine Orientalism

189

ual fiction, Michel Foucault states in The History of Sexuality: “Our problem is to know what marvelous ring confers a similar power on us, and on which master’s fi nger it has been placed; what game of power it makes possible or presupposes, and how it is that each one of us has become a sort of attentive and imprudent sultan with respect to his own sex and that of others.”53 The problem of the ring, for Foucault, is its generation of indiscreet loquacity in others and also its summary blindness concerning the ring-bearer’s desire to force speech. Diderot’s fictional rendition of a sultan who makes sex speak turns inexorably into Foucault’s investigation of the “history of this will to truth” that precedes the content of the sexual énoncés.54 According to Jane Gallop’s provocatively titled article “Snatches of Conversation,” the real function of Mangogul’s chaton (the stone in his ring) is reconfi rming the uncomfortable but eternal truths uttered by each chatte (pussy), a procedure in which no new knowledge is really gained but the usual suspects are rounded up, just as they were during Louis XV’s close watch on the brothels during the midcentury decades. The rubbing of the stone connects Mangogul’s desire, vaginal speech, and the resulting satisfaction of Mangogul and other listeners. In the manner of eighteenthcentury pornographic books that Jean-Marie Goulemot has aptly described as ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main (books that have to be read with just one hand), Mangogul’s mechanical rubbing of the stone is the generative engine of desire, but provocatively alluding to female rather than male masturbation.55 Gallop argues the paradox that the demand for sexual discourse in Western culture airs repeated variants of the eternal proposition “Woman is a liar.”56 The drift of this numbingly repetitive and tautological proposition would lead us to an acknowledgment that empiricist methodologies for documenting multiplicity can often wheel around to reconsolidate the Platonic archetypes that they aimed (but failed) to dislodge—even if Plato later flees the building of philosophy in Mangogul’s dream of the triumph of empiricism, which Diderot wrote as an additional chapter in the 1770s (see fig. 4.3). The new form of sexual surveillance imposed on the French court involved recognizing political value in the social secret and the potential use of such information by the authorities and by the king. This state objectification generated knowledge of intimate behavior, bureaucratic and also narrative, empirical as well as pornographic. State surveillance created a newer form of information technology while it pandered to the court’s desire for an old form of salacious gossip. As Nicolas Berryer’s and An-

190

chapter four

Figure 4.3. Mangogul’s dream. From the 1748 edition of Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets (Paris: Au Monomotapa, 1748). Image courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.

toine de Sartine’s policing and bureaucratic innovations developed during Louis XV’s reign, sexual information was gathered in the service of a modern, bureaucratic apparatus. Brothels became political institutions. By the 1770s, several decades after Diderot wrote Bijoux, bringing sex and books, seduction and interpretation, into a libertine synthesis, documents such as Mémoires secrets were taking cues from the oriental tale, constructing the ideal prostitute as a Scheherazade, and combining pornography, sex, and criminality in a female-centered narrative anchored in the logic of a state voyeurism.57 Police procedure influenced by the oriental tale, however, should be pursued a step further in terms of the epistemological and disciplinary occasion that constrains the academic discourse on sexuality. To the extent that scientific knowledge models Kantian “Enlightenment” avant la lettre, a professionalized, humanistic, medical, sociological, or sexological discourse about sex/sexuality is ultimately a “public” exchange about acts and motivations largely conducted in “private” spaces,

Libertine Orientalism

191

although political sexuality undoes these eighteenth-century and contemporary distinctions.58 While one tendency of the Enlightenment was to privatize the sexual, leading eventually to Victorian morality and its double standards in Britain, the French case suggests that the public sphere was, according to Pamela Cheek, “ineradicably sexualized.”59 Diderot’s fiction already describes an empirical epistemology of sex, using Orientalist contexts. The chasing after the truth of sex also reflects the sultan’s desire for “paradigmatic” structure over “syntagmatic” insertion. The jaded sultan prefers an epistemology and a theory of sex to the performance and the practice of it—a universalist Orientalist epistemology as opposed to a phenomenological immersion in life and practice. The desire for total cultural knowledge is perforce a new voyeurism as radical ascesis. Wanting to know how others have sex, the sultan defers his own interactive sexual pleasures. It is the boredom that Mangogul feels in relation to his mistress Mirzoza that makes him seek out the ring’s entertainment. The desires for enlightenment and for Orientalism come from the same affect: the profound boredom of the unenlightened Western subject. While the epistemic pleasures of voyeurism can no doubt accompany sexual activity, the encyclopedic project pursued by Mangogul is on a different order from simple sexual possession of women. The libidinal sultan—who could possess whichever woman he wanted—has turned inward to a more complicated abstemiousness. Knowing replaces experiencing—as Foucault puts it, “as if it were essential for us to be able to draw from that little piece of ourselves not only pleasure but knowledge, and a whole subtle interchange from one to the other: a knowledge of pleasure, a pleasure that comes of knowing pleasure, a knowledge-pleasure.”60 Epistemology and narrative replace sense perception through the flesh, and strangely, empiricism abandons sense perception for a cerebral science of differentiated attention. Sex becomes the switch-point for an indiscretion that resembles a renunciation by the observed object, and therefore something like a hermit’s fantasy of total sex for the observing intelligence that is a remaindered result of the dissolution of the subject. The ring makes possible sexual difference, vicariousness, prosthesis, and deferred representationality, turning concrete bodies into abstract instantiations of types that follow a systemic, even structuralist logic. Since the ring cannot be (or never is) turned on the wearer, the unexamined but observing intelligence, Mangogul is the sovereign exception among his subjects that were examined, ridiculed, bypassed, or humiliated (and those few that were rescued from unjust situations). As the individual element acquires meaning only from

192

chapter four

Figure 4.4. Zuleïman and Zaïdé. From the 1748 edition of Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets (Paris: Au Monomotapa, 1748). Image courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.

a system, the system in turn is pushed to the hermeneutic limit, incapable of representing the authenticity it sought (see fi g. 4.4).61 Furthermore, what is the implication of the turquerie in Bijoux that enables all these reflections on empiricist science, sexual truth, and police procedure? Ann Stoler argues about Foucault’s use of Diderot in Race and the Education of Desire that “the will to know the truth of ourselves is in sex, but not in it alone. The discourses of sexuality are racialized ways of knowing that relate somatic signs to hidden truths.”62 Rather than readily dissolve the Turkish-Congolese fancy dress into French familiarity, we

Libertine Orientalism

193

should examine the outer reaches of Diderot’s Enlightenment sexual discourse, whether in relation to the geometrical genitalia of the islanders (in the additional chapter titled “Des voyageurs” that may not have been written by Diderot but by Marc-Antoine Eidous) or to the falsifications of European sexuality against a naturalized Tahitian sexuality in the dialogues between A and B within the enigmatic Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772). Interrelated, overlapping, and sometimes disconnected perceptions and ideas have been taxonomized and systematized, making for an effective intercultural application. Orientalism constitutes a particular set of propositions that can themselves be disabling—yet as feminist and nationalist reappropriations of Orientalism have repeatedly shown, agency can be found among readers of these discourses precisely because of the discourses’ critical indeterminacy and rhetorical volatility. Enlightenment Orientalism involves the simultaneous use and explosion of cultural stereotypes, essences, and identities, wresting new problematics out of old thematics concerning the other. New configurations of existing stereotypes lead to unpredictable outcomes and uses that could not be foretold. When we keep in mind the lessons taught by Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Bijoux can also be seen in the manner recommended by Madeleine Dobie, “foregrounding . . . the global economy of Diderot’s writing, considering how France’s colonial history reverberates within its domestic economy, and emphasizing the fact that Bijoux was written in an age of exploration and international commerce.”63 As James Creech has suggested, the system of equivalences within which Mirzoza and other women are inserted mimics the structuring of labor power as a series of substitutable equivalences of similarities and differences under capitalism.64 Furthermore, if one woman is substitutable for another, a desire for empirical knowledge about the body and its association with others eventually relapses into the arcana of atavistic fable. In the words of Mirzoza, “Really . . . if our jewels could explain all our fancies, they would be wiser than we” (98, 414). That problem can be turned around into a feminist reappropriation that accuses the orchestrating principle of collapsing science into fable. Mangogul and Mirzoza perform a replay of Schahriar and Scheherazade from Les mille et une nuits. Scheherazade, the narrator who ransoms her own life daily and that of all womankind, is displaced from her central position, as the episodes in Bijoux are police reports, anti-tales bereft of complex narration. Instead we watch a parade of sexual suspects, each of whom enacts an increasingly familiar form of transgression, sexual subterfuge and betrayal (or adultery), after which she is summarily

194

chapter four

dismissed and not heard from again, convicted within the court of public opinion. These speeches by the jewels are solipsistic, simple confessional and intransitive avowals of actually existing desire or actually accomplished pleasure, whereas the complex narrative spoken by the upper mouths involves dissimulation, disavowal, and prevarication. The upper mouths enact a distraction from the deepest sexual hunger that is always at hand. The stone, or the ring, variously called “le chaton,” “la bague,” or “l’anneau,” makes each jewel speak and thereby reflects the power of coercion that empiricism has over its subordinate and created facts. Jewels, those most fetishized and fetishistic objects, are rendered as mechanisms of oral (or rather genital) testimony and therefore as supports of pure fact. Yet they are transitive in their intransitiveness—they speak the lingua franca of sexual frustration or fulfillment. The world of testimony appears initially to be fundamentally opposed to the world of narrative (and this is a repetition of the early novel’s attempt to speak itself as a truth discourse against the fictitious world of romance), but then the discourse turns into scientific empiricism defi ning itself against the newly achieved novelistic world of subjectivity—or the infracorporal reasserting itself against the transcorporal, as if through a Rabelaisian logic. Attempting to separate testimony from narration and referential description from representational speculation, the search for the discrete, the separable, the mathematical, and the biological ultimately fails through the inevitable mise en abyme generated by representational language. Antinarrative makes a higher claim to being the “true” story behind the self-serving dissimulations. The negative theology of Enlightenment Orientalism wins, as it did in Prévost’s and Crébillon’s works. Despite its somewhat different Richardsonian frame, in Diderot’s later fiction La religieuse (The Nun) the split subjectivalist-objectivalist narration that came up in Bijoux continues with three case histories. As a nubile, naturally beautiful young girl forced into a nunnery as a result of social stigma ensuing from her mother’s adulterous conception of her, Suzanne Simonin is the equivalent of a control case, or indeed the chaton that makes the three mother superiors’ sexualities speak to her as the delectable sexual object for female homosexual desire. Yet as the victimnarrator, Suzanne transfers her experiences of their sexualities en direct to the reader as she does not admit to understanding the meaning of the experiences. In this regard, Suzanne is an anti-Mangogul, or, if possible, a character that has elements of all three principal characters in Bijoux— Mangogul, Mirzoza, and Selim (who corresponds to the duc de Richelieu and narrates a male libertine voluntary equivalent of the previous invol-

Libertine Orientalism

195

untary forced narration by women’s jewels). Suzanne’s fi rst mother superior at the convent of Sainte-Marie at Longchamp, Mme. de Moni, is a transcendentalist who can sublimate sexuality into mystical religious experience in classical Christian fashion. The second mother superior, Sainte-Christine, is a sadist avant la lettre. The mother superior of Arpajon, where Suzanne is transferred out of Sainte-Christine’s clutches, is a tribade, or a sapphist, whose orgasms stimulated by Suzanne are rendered in painstaking detail. The mother superior of Arpajon is portrayed as a sultana of sorts, with a retinue of women reminiscent of gynocentrism within sexual segregation as described by Mary Wortley Montagu in her accounts of travels to the Ottoman Empire.65 The third trial of the ring in Bijoux takes Mangogul to the nunnery, where the nuns do not blush when they hear the jewels speak, as they are used to speculating wildly about sex despite their paucity of practice (56, 364). Objective narration vis-à-vis sentimentalism (and Richardson, Sterne, and Sade as successors come prominently to mind) makes for the evolution of the libertine novel, which enacts testimony and strategy but ultimately also explodes sentimentalist-subjectivalist coherence through the very mechanisms that were hitherto employed to shore up those subjects. If Bijoux can be seen as an antifeminist or a cryptofeminist oriental tale, and as an instance of male hysteria disguised as female speech, it also inaugurates a double discourse, of a materialistically determined netherworld of objective empiricism that could trump the subjective world of experience, including that of its pathological male initiator. Eventually, oppositions such as woman-man, Orient-Occident, and transgression-virtue are displaced by Enlightenment Orientalism through the defi nitional confusions created by the interpretive application of a hermeneutics of sexuality. The uninteresting nature of the jewels is akin to the uninteresting nature of the object that can narrate. The narrated is empirically superior but ontologically evanescent, even as the epistemological superiority of the institutional apparatus that narrates is withheld from critical analysis, whether the narrator is documenting the world of economic circulation or that of sexual-object choice. The narrator is, of course, just a point of articulation. The receiver of the narrative remains outside the field of vision, yet looms large because of an unnamed status at the level of subjective presupposition. Who is the narrative for? Why do objects talk if not for some listener who can at least momentarily transcend the status of object? Who is there outside the system of objectification? Are we in a world replete with speaking objects and without subjects, or a world of objectification that is accompanied by the process of desubjectivation in relation to

196

chapter four

an overarching and unchallengeable sovereignty of objectifying political discourse and reifying fi nancial practice? This is a question that ends up being posed in relation to the mode of Enlightenment Orientalism. While La religieuse and Bijoux share narratives reminiscent of sexual desubjectivation and Orientalist redefi nition, Bijoux involves objectification of a sort that has other implications. The novel’s narrations indicate their status as objects without accountability to a subject even though it is institutional coercion that made them speak. Forced confession is no confession at all, pseudoempirical speech as was enacted by the Inquisition upon the rack. Such an agency of objects without subjective guarantee suggests affinity with an entire genre of “spy” fiction that goes back to the origin of pseudoethnography in Marana and Montesquieu. Yet the idea of speaking genitalia was hardly new even in Diderot’s time—his own fiction had been preceded in 1747 by the comte de Caylus’s Nocrion conte allobroge, and there was also the mid-thirteenth-century precursor fabliau of Garin’s Du chevalier qui fi st les cons parler. Meanwhile, a new kind of object-centered pseudoethnography had made its appearance after the rise of “spy” fiction. By focusing on the common framework of felicity conditions, comparative assessment, and transgressive force, Bijoux categorizes sexual speech-acts. The device of the ring leads to the renunciation of an interpretive hermeneutics of sexuality in deference to direct sexual speech, deemed to be self-sufficient. In cataloging a universe of multiple outcomes through the coerced confession of past sexual shenanigans, Bijoux resembles other “it-narratives” or objectnarrators narrated episodically in a particular subgenre of mid- and later eighteenth-century English novels that became a veritable flood.66 Extremely popular in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century into the imperial nineteenth century, narratives of circulation—or it-narratives— are parallel phenomena to the pseudoethnographic oriental tales by writers such as Crébillon and Diderot. These commercially based narratives of circulation were “spy” novels imitating Marana. As early as 1709, Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy generated coins as speaking objects with picaresque narrative authority. It-narratives, like oriental tales, generated interfaces between global and domestic spheres even as they problematized the positionality, the translatability, and the decipherability of authorial and sexual personae. The split subjectivity enshrined in Bijoux echoes these tales as well. Christopher Flint lists the variety of speaking objects in the midcentury: “a settee, a sofa, a bedstead, a pulpit, a reading desk, a mirror, an old shoe, a smock, a waistcoat, a wig, a watch, a ring, an umbrella, a gold-

Libertine Orientalism

197

headed cane, a sedan, a pincushion, a thimble, a top, a pen, an old pocket Bible and a stagecoach.”67 Even if “the mobility of animate and inanimate forms . . . disrupts any coherent sense of social order,” such de-differentiation makes for the universal generality of global commerce predicated on contingent standpoints that narrate as they undo accepted cultural hierarchies. For Flint, money tales are especially indicative of global fusion and mixture—and we might wonder whether French libertine tales about sexual promiscuity are likewise important analogues for economic mixture. After all, le commerce in French brings meanings of trade and prostitution together. Object-narratives testify to the confusions and the convolutions of identity, the fragmentary narrations, the vast panoply of characters, the inadequate translations, and the continuous hermeneutic exchanges to which tales of Enlightenment Orientalism are also subject. Despite such strong common elements, narratives of Orientalism seem so exotic and eroticizing nowadays—whereas object-narratives are so quotidian and banalizing—and yet both forms of narration juxtapose peoples and goods, subjects and objects, agents and consumers, throwing all of them into stark relief. If, as Suzanne Pucci suggests, exoticism involves a relationship between viewing, an appropriating subject, and an otherness without, I would suggest that object-narratives collapse all three of these perspectives into the “it” that is object, subject, and other at the same time.68 This is indeed one of the tendencies at work in Mirzoza’s counterstrategy of demonstrating a fantasy world, where all specialized actors face metonymic reduction to their relevant body parts—dancers to their two feet or legs, singers to their throats, most women to a jewel, heroes and bullies to an armed fist, certain scholars to a skull without a brain, card players to two shuffling hands, a glutton to two jaws in constant motion, a fl irt to two eyes, and so on (125, 435). It is tempting to think that the ultimate metaphor of the speaking jewel as sexual fetish overlaps with the various versions of the talking economic commodity. Even just a few titles of the dozens of garrulous and indiscreet coins floating in English narrative space after 1750 can make this point: “The adventures of a bad shilling”; “The adventures of a half guinea”; “The adventures of a half penny”; “The adventures of a shilling”; “The adventures of a three-shilling bank token”; The Adventures of a silver penny; The Adventures of a silver threepence; Argentum, or Adventures of a shilling; Aureus, or the Life and opinions of a sovereign; The Birmingham counterfeit, or Invisible spectator; The Adventures of a bank-note; Chrysal, or the Adventures of a guinea; and The Adventures of a rupee.69 The narrators’ avowals of empirical truth resemble those made by

198

chapter four

early pseudoanthropological novels; yet they are bereft of the subsequent conversions featuring retroactive identification and subject construction that make novels turn their narrators from objects into subjects, as Defoe’s famously do. When empirical narration, in Bijoux or Francis Coventry’s The Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751), produces the objectivist narration as truth and the subjectivist one as a lie, the empiricist dream differs from the autopoetic dream of the early novelist who shows the subject gaining mastery over a world of objects. Narratives of circulation such as Coventry’s and Diderot’s end with subjects who are rendered objects, and subjectival and objectival narration are shown as parallel and formally equivalent even if ultimately irreconcilable. It is as if the ideological work of the early novels of Defoe and Richardson, which shore up the autobiographical subject, were being deliberately reversed into a Diderotian monistic materialism characterized by desubjectivation rather than the usual novelistic subjectification. An earlier focus on the biographical subject is exchanged for a centering on the object, but it is important to add that this counterweight exercised by object-narratives is not a tendency unique to Enlightenment Orientalism. We might also be getting ahead of ourselves here: Mangogul’s fi nal reconciliation with Mirzoza after he abandons the empiricist obsession with the discourse-generating ring leaves unanswered the epistemological question of the ring’s function. No matter what he says about his conversion, was Mangogul psychologically unable to deal with the implications of the ring’s truths, or was he rejecting their claims in the steadfast manner of Mirzoza? The renunciation of empiricism precedes the couple’s retreat into new realms of romantic subjectivity. Is this “happily ever after” or, boringly, “back to square one”? Unable to abandon his libidinal investment in Mirzoza, Mangogul cannot bring his interest in sexology to fruition. A murmured articulation of Mirzoza’s virtue nearly leads to her death, and upon her recovery Mangogul abandons the ring. The genie takes the ring away, and science is sacrificed to a renewal of the rites of pleasure. The philosophical implications of these object-narratives involve the entrapment of these objects within a system of circulation and signification. Diderot had translated the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit into French in 1745, and the notion of natural systems that obsesses Bijoux, object-narratives, and also Shaftesbury is a parodic echo of earlier theistic investments in great chains of being, now inflected with a materialist cast. Rather than reproduce chains of being focusing on theology and ontology, these narratives invest in the interrelationality between moral and social switch-points that are virtual and multi-

Libertine Orientalism

199

directional. Anthropology, relationality, and relativity are employed for taxonomic differentiation bereft of inherent ontological content. The implications of Diderot’s anthropology are philosophically materialistic, physiologically deterministic, and socially egalitarian, unlike Shaftesbury’s text, which mediates Christian virtues with the new material and empirical philosophy.70 While Mangogul wants to “know” rather than “imagine,” his lover Mirzoza would rather deny herself the lèse-majesté of empirical appropriation that degenerates into the projection of stereotype. Mangogul plays the role of Schahriar in the Mille et une nuits, enacting a paranoid and proactive form of misogyny, assuming all women to be guilty of infidelity, but at the same time he is constitutionally incapable of confronting the affective implications of betrayal by Mirzoza upon delivering her to the empiricist-epistemological sword. Mirzoza, however, is an anti-Scheherazade, who refuses the seduction of narrative for the surety of her own virtue, unsullied because she refuses to put it to the proof. When it is proven against Mirzoza’s wishes, Mangogul has to concede the collapse of truth, fiction, and lies in the area of sexual epistemology. Those truths that cannot be narrated are best left undisturbed. Bijoux ends with the infi nite narration of Mille et une nuits petering out into silence by the near-death of the loved one, Mirzoza, in whose name all the discourse was generated. As James Creech and also Thomas Kavanagh have argued, the paradox of empiricist sexual discourse experimented with by Diderot reveals that behind the direct objectival or referential narration preferred by science obtains an untranscendable horizon of more language—and endless interpretation— and the search for a language of truth only forces attention back to the language of lies that keeps obscuring truth. The desire for empiricism is thwarted by Diderot’s favorite concepts: mystification and deception.71 With the permanent inexhaustibility of literary language revealed, the fiction is declared closed and readers are forced back to their own devices. Is this closing of the book a long-delayed acknowledgement that the police procedures of defi nitional identity have ultimately failed? Perhaps that realization is ultimately deferred rather than decided, as the genie Cucufa departs, “in a whirl [en pirouettant] just as he had come” (258, 538). The Oriental device self-destructs with no significant remainder—cultural or otherwise—to be inspected. This could indeed be an abandonment of the thematic of the Orient altogether, a kind of epistemic surrender on the question of the meaning of sex and, for that matter, culture. What happens to Diderot’s author function and ethno-philosophical content when the geography under consideration within this novel is non-

200

chapter four

Europe and is called by the names Congo, Persia, Tahiti, Turkey, China, Peru? What special irony dominates the police procedure of ascribing the author function to Diderot, especially when after writing it he kept expressing a desire to repudiate the text for most of the next three decades of his life, though at the same time he was secretly writing extra chapters about Mangogul’s dream and Cyclophile’s narration about islanders with geometrical genitalia? Was Diderot really willing to lose a digit to have unwritten this text, as Jacques-André Naigeon reports? As Diderot’s text is self-reflexive about writing and masturbation, which digit would he have sacrificed? Are interactions that involve Europe and non-Europe in need of a theory of interfaces, a catalog of chimeras, or a science of false consciousnesses? Bijoux suggests itself as an exemplary text within this central discursive problematic of Orientalism. Is culture about contents associated with a political geography (wherein the adjective European becomes proprietorial), or is it a set of hypotheses that, like any series of claims, are themselves subject to dispute and transgression just as authorial attribution and political boundary making are? The collocation of libertine language, investigative science, and court society within an Orientalist frame in Bijoux does not promise to tell us much about the category called “culture” in positivist terms—unless we were willing to acknowledge that culture in this instance is a matter of projection, sarcasm, phantasm, and fabulation. To some extent, this series of negative propositions, satirical deflations, and philosophical and scientific juxtapositions, as we found in Bijoux, has been given a name in retrospect: the Enlightenment. But whether Enlightenment actually constitutes a “culture” is a matter of even greater debate. For Diderot, sexuality is the perfect example of this interpretive indeterminacy, fought over by both religion and science. As is said at one moment in Bijoux, “The Brahmin had explained the chatter of the jewels with the help of religion just as well as Orcotomus had done by the light of reason” (78–79, 381). As ideologues busily labor to ascribe cultural meaning to sexuality by resorting to religion or biology in the manner of the Brahmin or Orcotomus, sexuality operates as a self-differentiating complex that both draws from “nature”-given anatomy and ceaselessly surpasses it through “culture”-given creative (and artificial) conceptualizations of other spaces, practices, and alternative bodies. In Diderot’s fiction, discourses on sexual orientation meet those pertaining to Enlightenment Orientalism, resulting in mutual persiflage, mystification, and indeed déception in French: illusion, deception, and disappointment. The point of these dilatory and repetitive exercises of elicitation of

Libertine Orientalism

201

discourse, however, is that neither science nor religion—neither biology nor theology—can be relied on to explicate sexuality, though each of them will try its utmost to do so, and may even perform well—but always insufficiently. We have never left Crébillonian territory—Mazulhim is both impotent and the greatest seducer. Libertinism achieves universality through impotence, and sexuality triumphs in the place of sex. The truth-telling of the jewels is orchestrated in the manner of a truth serum (or radiolike waves from the despot’s ring), and yet the stakes increase as the procedure is applied to the relationship most relevant to the despot. The relationship between the despot and his mistress matters more than the voluminous archive of sexual information that has been gathered up to that point. Dozens of objectivities are jettisoned at the novel’s conclusion in order to arrive at one precious subjectivity, Mirzoza’s. She is a special case for which universalism can be waived—the Oriental despot does not need to subject himself or his mistress to his own laws. However, as exception, Mirzoza also embodies the constitutive contradiction of a system of objectification that relies on one subjective interrelation that is the cause, consequence, and ultimate semantic horizon of the epistemological project. Universalism fails in the more radical sense, upon confrontation with an exception that will always be its remainder, ungroundable ground and nonuniversal singularity. That exceptional territory features pure love and complete delusion, and also houses the vantage point from which it would be possible—or impossible—to distinguish self from other.

chapter five

The Oriental Tale as Transcultural Allegory: Manley, Haywood, Sheridan, Smollett

Behold these Characters engraven by the Fingers of the most subtil Ypres all Caihou affords: These on the Top are to Transform, those at the Bottom to Reform. —Atamadoul in Adventures of Eovaai (1736)

T

he libertine strain of Enlightenment Orientalism that begins with Fontenelle and Marana and develops through to Swift, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot has earlier antecedents. This chapter focuses on how transcultural allegory supersedes national realism through multilocal modes of presentation. I will examine works by Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan, and Tobias Smollett, fictions that proceed on a parallel track to the Watt-inspired itinerary from Defoe to Fielding and Austen. While allegorical and scandal-oriented storytelling has been deemed a precursor to the realist novel, we need to reexamine these earlier forms as providing transcultural lines of fl ight from within the national language. In these works, neither author nor reader is forced into an exclusionary ethnocultural epistemology. Enlightenment Orientalism as transcultural allegory is a corollary to Fontenellian cosmological realism and Maranaesque pseudoethnography, and while it corresponds to the serious satirical applications of Swift and Montesquieu, Manley, Haywood, Sheridan, and Smollett invest this dimension with a jocose libertinism. Scandal fiction performs the proto-Enlightenment functions of defamiliarization and moral regrounding. As for the rubric of Orientalism, it is worth recognizing that the restricted geography of nineteenth-century Orientalism made it a function of space, whereas forms of Orientalism extant until the late eighteenth century invoked a broader comparative perspective that was neoclassi202

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

203

cal in its inclusion of Oriental cultures, religions, practices, and polities within a general transcultural framework. The local acquires a different value when positioned alongside the translocal, of which it is seen as an instance and a variation. At this earlier point, Enlightenment Orientalism is a universalism that is not about a separate sphere—whether geographical, ethnocultural, or religious—as it became later. A projected transcultural classicism interconnected multiple frameworks and epistemologies, none of which had yet led to nationalist partition and geographical separation. The parting of ways between East and West occurs after the 1780s with the institutionalization of Europe’s national literatures through the steady rise of print capitalism, followed by a subsequent wave of Romanticism and the establishment of imperial bureaucracies. The Romantic Orientalism that came after furthered an antiquarian knowledge of Asia as Europe’s demonic Other, rather than its previous status as Christendom’s originary source, old rival, and living contemporary. This process of separation from the perceived fountainhead is the hidden impact of modernizing theories of the novel that partly institute what they claim to describe. Michael McKeon’s magisterial The Secret History of Domesticity provides a telling example of this kind of intellectual history. McKeon regards modern Enlightenment culture as a division of knowledge that exacerbated the tacit distinction between public and private in traditional societies into an explicit separation. He focuses on how unified concepts such as estate, honor, propriety, subjecthood, and romance devolve into twinned versions, each with a public and a private function. Estate splits when the public state is moved away from the private estate; honor is separated when family lineage means something different from personal virtue; the meaning of propriety becomes only social appropriateness as its earlier economic meaning is carried into property; subjecthood is parceled into political subjection as a different matter from individual subjectivity; and romance significantly disintegrates when the idea of historical veracity migrates elsewhere and only concerns around fictional falsehood remain. McKeon deems that such “explicitation” culminates in the interplay between public and private, and also in the later conflation of the two spheres. However, such a theory of modernity relies on a national-realist grounding in novelistic specificity, whereby the function of print culture further emphasizes and particularizes the explicitations and devolutions just described. But McKeon’s metanarrative does not tell the whole story. How would we account for the weak counterforce of those literary works that perform a lateral displacement away from full national realist explici-

204

chapter five

tation into ethnocultural imprecision? Such writings are not irrelevant or marginal even if they are deemed so by later generations; their impact was often greater in their own time than that of the realist fictions that later critics insist as being central. McKeon attempts to fi nd the proof of his concept in a genre such as the secret history, but he is forced to admit that generic ambivalence points to an alternative that he does not really want to explore: “the [secret history] form is ultimately dedicated neither to the realm of the public nor to that of the private but to an experimental inquiry into the limits of their emergent separability.”1 Enlightenment Orientalism performs this experimental inquiry with great verve, not just into the limits of the separability of private and public as proposed by McKeon’s negative formulation, but also in terms of the overlapping of multiple versions of publicity and privacy from past and present. By way of these successes, the mode of Enlightenment Orientalism performs a countertheory of the novel, displacing fiction outside the nation and avoiding the gatekeeping questions that surround any account of realism. Enlightenment Orientalism suspends the normative assumptions that underlie descriptions of public-private devolution. Rather than sequencing conflation as occurring after devolution, allegorical fictions problematize any stageist metanarrative concerning the birth of modernity. The aesthetic imaginary is not properly a fourth sphere added to the sociologically defi ned nation, market, and civil society; rather, the aesthetic imaginary reconfigures the hard social realities of the first three areas through writerly and readerly immersion into fictional alternatives that fl it between the real and the counterfactual. The secret history does not just mediate between the national public and the domestic private, as McKeon asserts. It is also the vehicle for the introduction of the foreign and the culturally external as both the tissue of implementation and the screen of projection whereby the two functions can be separated and interposed. The secret history poses alternatives to any simple account of the public sphere, offering multiple spaces and places, and scandals that turn into distractions. Refusing the normativity implied by McKeon’s account of domesticity, the secret history alleges the existence of multiple publics as well as events that escape public relevance. A metaphor is never just a functional trope, especially when it is multiplied into voluminous prose fictions and screen allegories. The novel, therefore, is not the sole hero of the creation of a singular modernity through the fabrication of psychological interiority; the former can be fashioned in multiple ways by various techniques of immersiveness that do not have to be normatively mimetic or based on a correspondence theory of truth.

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

205

Interactivity and intermediation through transcultural comparison could work just as well, and we need a new phenomenology concerning fantasy, daydreaming, and autosuggestion that surpasses mimesis.2 The inception of Enlightenment Orientalism is a late seventeenthcentury phenomenon. It involves perceptions of parallelism between the pomp and circumstance of Louis XIV’s court and attempts to match it in Restoration England by Charles II and his circle. A certain degree of ostentation goes along with sexual licentiousness and radical forms of unreligious behavior. Meanwhile, attempts to consolidate Catholicism or Anglicanism (whether against Huguenot challenges in France or disruptions posed by the Dissenters in England) arose in the wake of a newly developed radical skepticism rooted in scientific and geographical discovery, a shift that intellectual historian Paul Hazard calls la crise de la conscience européenne. 3 Wealth on a par with the fabled riches of Venice and Turkey, which had always given the Western European aristocracy an inferiority complex, looked to be fi nally within reach now that the Ottoman Empire had suffered military and political decline. Within this context, side-byside comparisons of French and English monarchs with Eastern bashaws and potentates were de rigueur, not as part of a vaguely conceived “exoticism” but as straightforward political recognition of European desires for luxury commodities and hedonistic practices. The sliding scale of association went contiguously from English elites to the French aristocracy to Italy, Turkey, and beyond, identifying areas that were famous for sexual licentiousness and alternative social mixtures but also admired for power, ostentation, and wisdom, and where despotism and enlightenment could be collocated. Could British national realism, in the manner of today’s Islamic fundamentalism, be read as a reaction-formation to a more powerful force that demoralized local identities? This would differ from accounts that imagine British cultural nationalism as a natural unfolding of superiority rooted in internal strength, as the more self-satisfied versions project retrospectively.4 That would be a humbling rather than triumphalist view of the rise of realism, even if nineteenth-century European imperial dominance helped spread novels as normative fictions around the world.

SCANDALOUS CHRONICLES AND LIBERTINE ALLEGORIES As a counterexample to the conventional stereotypes that circulate concerning the sexual oppression of Muslim women, let us consider the extraordinary fiction written by Gabriel de Brémond called Hattigé, ou les amours du roi de Tamaran (1676; English translation Hattigé, or The

206

chapter five

amours of the king of Tamaran, 1680). The roman à clef exposes an openended affair that took place between King Charles II and Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland. Alongside the references to royal fornication is a sensitive and sympathetic account of the female libertinism of the title character. Confi ned when pirates take control of her ship while she is on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Hattigé becomes the object of sexual competition between a knight of Malta and a Turkish pirate chief. Hattigé’s country of origin, Tamaran, is presented as a place where love reigns supreme, beyond even the expected romance locales of Granada and Cyprus: “the young people, incourag’d by their Fathers Examples, get themselves Mistresses before they get rid of the Rod of their School-Master.”5 In this mythical Eastern country, everyone from the King to the Ploughman enjoys a natural liberty. We are in the realm of a sexual utopia that involves free love and open marriages. The King, who acts like a Turkish sultan, takes Hattigé as his mistress from another courtier but is then cuckolded, as Hattigé beds the master gardener’s nephew and subsequently the master gardener himself. A delightful cross-dressing episode involves the King disguised in a mountain Bedouin woman’s habit—black veil, linen drawers, and a white blanket. The King is trying to pass himself off as Rajab, the master gardener’s nephew, who had adopted the same disguise to meet Hattigé. We may not yet be in the realm of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, though the delicious dénouement of the narration involves two adulterous pairs: the King and the master gardener’s wife, Roukhia, witness a sexual assignation in the same bower between Roukhia’s husband, Meharen, and Hattigé. Most important, the novella ends with a surprise: rather than making the expected delivery of the delectable Hattigé into the arms of the desirable Knight, the Maltese abstemiously grants the female libertine her freedom, taking all Christians off the prize ship and returning her to Islamic territories. Female sexual and physical freedom is an Ottoman aristocratic privilege—as Mary Wortley Montagu will strenuously argue in her famous Turkish Embassy Letters, contradicting the claims made by prurient male travelers to Turkey.6 The Knight of Malta learns from another female captive about how Hattigé and the King of Tamaran began to exchange lovers in an increasingly complicated exercise of jealousy, substitution, revenge, and mimetic desire. Roukhia, the master gardener’s wife, became the King’s lover, mimicking an anticipatory jealousy Hattigé had planted in his head. The denouement, while flirting with harem-related themes of revenge and jealousy, ends with other delirious substitutions. The King decides to punish Hattigé and Maheran by giving them each other’s company while he sub-

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

207

stitutes the newly acquired Roukhia for Hattigé as his chief mistress. The plotting Aga, Hattigé’s chief enemy, who wishes to expose her, is reminiscent of Cleveland’s bitter enemy Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. The Aga is neutralized, however, and this allows the further unfolding of libertine logics. Politics and sex substitute for each other, and freedom is a function of opportunity, guile, and subterfuge. The Orientalist world within which these characters operate is amoral. A transcultural comparative perspective makes available referents, modes, narratives, ways of life, and arguments. It might be worth revaluating the secret history as a genre of Enlightenment Orientalism, involving parallel systems of reference—both familiar and unfamiliar—allowing for invective and disavowal.7 Another of Charles’s mistresses, Louise de Keroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, was evoked as Indamora in a scandal fiction titled The Amours of the Sultana of Barbary (1689). Yet another fiction, The Pagan Prince (1690), continues this literary obsession with Charles II’s love life. Charles II was the English monarch who came closest to embodying the values of libertinism, and his courtiers aspired to sexual licentiousness and ostentatious display within the context of atheism, scientific materialism, and colonial discovery of objects, peoples, and other worlds. As a result, the incestuous desires of brothers for sisters were politicized. Lesbianism was not just a sign of the confi nement of women in harems but also reflected the scandalous exposure of Queen Anne’s favorites a few decades later. Why does a genre that involves eroticism and private scandal in France turn into something of greater political import in the English context? As a very perceptive critic opines, “The English were incapable of appreciating the French concern with the subtleties of love.”8 Love is reduced to sex even as social peccadillo is advanced into the realm of politics. Behn’s scandal fiction, the fi rst installment of Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, has been identified as one of the fi rst English examples of the French chronique scandaleuse / roman à clef genre, which was brought to perfection in French through Roger de Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaules and Madame de Lafayette’s La princesse de Clèves. However, with the relatively recent identification of Oroonoko as a colonial origin of the English novel, there has been overemphasis on the Surinam episode and little attention paid to the Orientalist fi rst half involving Oroonoko and Imoinda’s African sojourn. New readings of Oroonoko might identify the royal slave as the figure par excellence of Enlightenment Orientalism, parachuted across the Atlantic. Orientalism tragically fails when Oroonoko, living according to the conventions and expectations set for him as the alazon figure of high French romance, can-

208

chapter five

not turn himself into the eiron of contemporary novelistic narrative as does the shape-shifting female narrator of the novella. Therefore, Oroonoko is an allegory of the failure of Enlightenment Orientalism when it is disciplined by a colonial realism anticipating the national realism of several decades later. If the now-canonical readings of Oroonoko as the origin of a certain English literary history have subordinated its Orientalism to its colonialism, it is of interest that women’s writing, including the bravura performance of Behn’s narrator, is predicated on the conversion of Orientalist raw materials into national narratives with the woman writer as intermediary. If there is one kind of reading that sees Oroondates foreshadow Oroonoko, who in turn foreshadows a real-life Equiano, there may be a different literary-historical future (and past) for Oroonoko’s character as Sindbad, or even Aladdin. Just like Sindbad’s, Oroonoko’s travels lead to perpetual adventure, and Aladdin chiastically reverses Oroonoko by showing how a waif can become a prince, whereas Oroonoko is a prince who turns into a social pet. The incipient Englishness of Oroonoko is a fringe effect that can only be retroactively recognized and appropriated by nationalist literary history after the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that the ethos of Oroonoko vastly exceeds any national designation, evoking medieval miracle work as well as transatlantic slavery, Mediterranean romantic love, and transcontinental satire.9 While there is uncertainty about the attribution of The Secret History of Queen Zarah to Manley, the preface to this work already raised important questions about the scope of a national-realist history of early eighteenth-century fiction, as I discussed in the introduction.10 The translation from Abbé de Bellegarde as Manley’s preface suggests that “the Names of Persons ought to have a Sweetness in them, for a Barbarous Name disturbs the Imagination,” but this proclamation leaves unclear whether sweetness comes from familiarity or ideality, given that the barbarous stranger is neither familiar nor ideal.11 As Behn suggests in her translation of Fontenelle and in the preface to Oroonoko, probability and truth are not necessarily aligned but in fact frequently at loggerheads. Defenders of the realist novel eliminate discrepancies at both ends of the defensible middle, given that the implicitly statistical notion of probability undergirds national realism. The preface to Zarah makes a pitch for the historian (or fiction writer) to adopt a rhetorician’s strategy, a narration demonstrating how the improbable can indeed be truthful. At the same time, just as Nero’s matricide is considered historically accurate though it is an unusual and improbable event, the virtuous heroine of early Greek fiction—whom we rediscover

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

209

as maintaining her chastity under all odds in Richardson’s Pamela—is highly improbable even if categorized under the rubric of realistic fiction. Some narrative expectations emerge through role play: direct speech cannot have characters speaking forever in syllogisms, but third-person narration can include retrospective moral reflection and the elaboration of moral maxims.12 Contradictory expectations are present in the background within Manley’s fictions, constituting an oeuvre that historians of the novel have found difficult to integrate into their Whiggish teleologies of national realism and the role such histories assign to allegorical fiction. For instance, Catherine Gallagher’s desire to distinguish “fiction” as an exclusive property of the genre of the national-realist novel results in the shunting of the genre of the secret history into a historical dead end. Gallagher says about Manley that “her genre . . . was not ‘fiction’ as she facetiously (and many later critics quite seriously) claimed, but was rather ‘scandalous allegorical narrative.’ “13 However, while it sometimes appears that literary figures and representations become “mere codes” for scandal-mongering journalism, Gallagher is forced to acknowledge that these figures are never ordinarily instrumental, and that when enjoying a book such as New Atalantis the reader is not just caught up in the task of disambiguating the various levels of referentiality. The representational frameworks signify far in excess to their expository function. Gallagher asserts that “a sheer excess of story . . . cannot accurately be called ‘fiction’ because it retains the pleasurable and controversial doubleness.” Such a judgment is prescriptive, retroactively projected from the realist novel of the nineteenth century with realist disambiguation as the master code. If, as Gallagher herself acknowledges, Manley’s fictions consist of representation and reference supplementing rather than supplanting each other, then the pleasures of speaking in code and multiple Oriental figures are not ordinary coincidences but a value system that needs a different reckoning. Manley’s literary techniques are not just epiphenomena to the legal exigencies of their time. Those constraints are surely necessary but insufficient conditions that frame any analysis of the significance of Manley’s work.14 Manley was well versed in the French roman à clef and chronique scandaleuse and the Italian novella traditions, and her earlier attempts at fiction are Marana-influenced, for instance the pseudoethnographic Letters Written By Mrs. Manley (1696). Manley had also written Orientalist drama in Dryden’s mode, featuring characters such as the lustful Homais (Homais, Queen of Tunis, 1689) and Osman, borrowed from Hattigé, in The Royal Mischief (1696). Several scholars have documented the influence of

210

chapter five

Hattigé on The History of Queen Zarah, a work that continues to explore political exposé via the scandalous implications of aristocratic sex.15 The allegorical aspect of this fiction has been discussed, pointing as it does to the rise of Sarah Churchill and the expedient rise of her husband from being the lover of Charles II’s mistress to becoming one of the duumvirs who ruled the country. The roman à clef reveals how the Marlboroughs gained power by deftly fi nding favor with a succession of monarchs from Charles II and William III to Anne. However, the model of the secret history creates a double structure of representation that feeds teleologically inward to the nation from live external comparisons that are jettisoned from literary focus because of their instrumentalization. While the allegories are not always geographically Orientalist in the most technical sense, a comparative structure featuring multilocal and transcultural references is never far from these applications. Manley’s seduction fictions have been described by John Richetti as featuring the by-then well-known stereotypes of the “aristocratic libertinseducer” and the “persecuted and innocent maiden.” We might well ask whether there is something supplementary about the Orientalization of seduction as well as the seductiveness of the Orient that follows from these settings. The Oriental is frequently dismissed as a fancy dress that adds color to national and local scandal content.16 However, the dressing is indeed central to the fiction, with characters such as the young Germanicus “in a dress and posture not very decent to describe . . . newly risen from the bath, and in a loose gown of carnation taffety, stained with Indian figures.”17 Clothes, and the related sartorial and cultural attitudes and dispositions, form the shell, surface, and plot, pursued through contiguity rather than internal content. At the same time, the content of the narrative features doctrinally challenging questions, such as the justifiability of polygamy. This occurs even through entirely indigenous stories of bigamy such as the scandal surrounding the murder/suicide of Sarah Stout by a married lover who proposed bigamy to her (she is Orientalized as “Zara” in the text).18 Polygamy is never just an Islamic question but a very live issue, given Charles II’s multiple progeny through various mistresses. Rendered as Emperor Sigismund, Charles along with his amours was the subject of contemporary pamphlet debates around polygamy, going back to Milton’s unorthodox views on the subject.19 Manley’s allegorical references oscillate from classical European to loosely Oriental sources, free-floating and transcultural with a center of gravity closer to the southern Mediterranean, where the Levant, North Africa, and Europe collide. As critics have occasionally noted, the classical

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

211

and Oriental-sounding names of Manley’s characters, such as Zarah, Roxelana, and Zelinda, document a general facility and ease of juxtaposition of multiple histories—Byzantine, Middle Eastern, and also pan-European. Manley is also making a claim to a literary sphere empowered newly by women’s writing with its unofficial, polyvocal, and hybrid dimensions, as feminist critics of the masculinist rise-of-the-novel thesis have argued.20 As is usual in this loosely Oriental imposture, we hear of stories that are translations of manuscripts being kept in the Vatican, renowned for its vast Oriental collections that rivaled what Oxford and Paris were trying to build up in the post-Renaissance period. All the same, Manley is resolutely focused on the moral truth and accuracy of fable, much more than the accuracy of the journalistically contingent details of the historical relation, which John Dennis argued was the true source of fictional pleasure and instruction.21 In a preface to the second volume, Manley pays tribute to Varro and Lucian in writing satirical fiction based on moral philosophy. A significant indirect factor that reinforces the Orientalist background comes from her father, Roger Manley, who authored translations of The Description of the Kingdoms of Japan and Siam (1683) and continuations of Richard Knolles and Paul Rycaut’s famous Turkish History (1687), the source of so much knowledge of the Ottoman world. It is no coincidence that in one of the famous seduction stories in the New Atalantis, the Countess urges the young Charlot to read the history of Roxelana, who “by her wise address brought an imperious sultan, contrary to the established rules of the seraglio, to divide with her the royal throne.”22 Charlot will succumb to seduction and betrayal, but the Countess will emulate the Turkish model and win her social superior’s hand in marriage, as does the servant girl Pamela in Richardson’s eponymous novel. Manley’s fiction puts Turkish queens on a par with the famous Roman harlot Sempronia and the scandal story around the apocryphal Pope Joan. Defoe may have adapted Roxana’s dancing scene from Richard Head’s The English Rogue, in which the whore, Mrs. Mary, dresses as the Turkish Roxolana as a way of entertaining her patron.23 Again, it is the side-by-side juxtaposition of forms of harlotry—Western and Eastern, classical and contemporary—that allows for a comparative history. Memoirs of Europe will apply a parallel between the eighth-century Byzantine history of the eastern wing of the Holy Roman Empire and eighteenth-century English politics. A send-up in this text of the duke of Ormonde, the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, tags him as a viceroy of the Indies, clearly indicating how colonialist overlords are eminently substitutable for each other.24

212

chapter five

Astrea’s return to Atalantis in the Mediterranean as the frame fiction for New Atalantis takes place so that she can better instruct her young charge, the future prince of the moon—a nod to Fontenellian and Fénelonian precursors. Astrea was also Aphra Behn’s nom de plume, and even though Manley’s framework is not epistolary, the ethnographic turn to travel and social analysis evokes Marana. An important factor is the gendered difference: all the characters of the frame fiction, Astrea, Virtue, Lady Intelligence, and Mrs. Nightwork, are women. The epistemological fragility of the exercise is crucial. Cultural translation is de rigueur, partly indicated by the false claims made by many such texts to be linguistic translations, including The Secret History of Queen Zarah, New Atalantis, and Memoirs of Europe. The last of these pretends to be authored originally in Latin by Eginhardus and then translated into French in 1535. The preface to the second part of The Secret History of Queen Zarah makes the preposterous claim that “the Manuscript is so Ancient that ‘tis suppos’d to be writ by Cain in the Land of Nod, before Cities were Built, or Men had form’d themselves into Government.”25 Fictitious overkill signals a code to be deciphered but also phantasmatic pleasures to be savored. The adventures depicted in New Atalantis supposedly take place in the language of “mixed Italian, a speech corrupted and much in use through all the islands of the Mediterranean.”26 Astrea fi nds her long-lost mother Virtue in rags, and Virtue introduces her to Lady Intelligence, whose “garments are all hieroglyphics.” Allegorical interpretation intersects here with Enlightenment Orientalism, as the nature of political and cultural insight connects the arcana of those in power with an audience that would like to be informed but is hitherto disempowered. Virtue asks Intelligence to take a few moments “to inform foreigners of the temper, genius, and history of this island,” and this generalized utopian intelligence chronicle thereby gets under way.27 Such temper and genius might anticipate physical violence between a clergyman and his wife (as in the Parson Trulliber episode in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews). At the same time, while evaluating the political ethics of this fictionalized England, Astrea must draw an unfavorable comparison with Egypt, where the machinery of justice deals harshly with expressions of ingratitude such as those that appear as standard features in political culture in Britain.28 A rambunctious localism is nevertheless present in some of the stories in New Atalantis, whether boudoir seductions or quotidian scandals of rural life, such as a loquacious countrywoman’s tragic story of a seduction of a gentlewoman’s daughter leading to pregnancy, infanticide, and the execution of the mother.29 This local color and contemporary reference should

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

213

not be taken as the realist truth against which the rest is Orientalist superfluity. Rather, narrative choice drives truth-claims into the comparative and metatextual sphere of Enlightenment Orientalism. In Manley’s fictions, the intertwining of Orientalism and classicism cannot be separated from a journalistic desire to level and expose in the manner of Hattigé, even if this is not necessarily the “high” political and philosophical satire found later in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. 30 What is sometimes exposed is the effrontery of Orientalism tout court, not so much as exotica but as a status symbol of prestige and aristocratic pedigree. For instance, Manley draws on the scandal story of Ralph Montagu, who married Elizabeth Albemarle in order to have access to her considerable inheritance and contest her deceased fi rst husband’s will leaving his estate to the earl of Bath. Montagu pretended to be the emperor of China and consummated the marriage; Manley converts this tidbit into an episode where he is “a certain grandee” who convinces his lady love that random men laboring in the fields are his slaves and that he is the king of Egypt, which “tumbled the lady and all her wealth into his arms.”31 Incest stories, such as that between Polydore and Urania, and the secretly coded lesbian New Cabal suggested by Manley as headed by Lady Wharton allude to a general defamiliarization of family, tradition, nature, and normative social expectation. The reader is in a world altogether different from the heteronormativity that will be ushered in by British national realism. If there is a normative reference of sorts, it is to the world of the seraglio and the harem rather than to anything like the English nuclear family. How else can the reader contextualize the incident involving a bride, daughter of the marchioness of Caria—again the duchess of Marlborough—bartered by her own mother to the son of her lover? In the description of Sarah’s daughter, Manley can pull off the inherent doubleness of Orientalist fantasy and topical satire: “this lady, conscious of her mother’s mighty interest, haughty as a daughter of the seraglio, bore herself upon the merit of her grandeur and, like an Ottoman bride, looked down with contempt upon the Bassa.”32 The bride’s mother would, in any case, be dissatisfied even with the riches of both the Indies. 33 By tracing the thematics of collusive resistance in seduction narratives of the old Tory ideology pre-1689 and the virtuous subordinate resistance that characterized the new Tory ideology post-1689, a study by Toni Bowers shows that seduction narratives of the period are extremely significant for political as well as erotic reasons, and that these kinds of fiction unite the political and the novelistic spheres far more compellingly than modernization hypotheses around realism, which may have played a subordi-

214

chapter five

nate role but did not accomplish the main job. We should adduce cultural dimensions as well. Sexual shenanigans are intertwined with political allegations, and physical proximity in court culture allows the access that translates politics and influence along the lines of sexual intercourse. Political speculation is combined with fi nancial peculation. It is inaccurate to think of sex as “standing for” politics or vice versa; rather, episodes of conspiracy, secret understandings, betrayals, and double dealing are narrative elements just as easily sexual as political, especially as the categories that predominate this form of fiction are secrecy and exposure, which correspond to multilocal rather than specifically English notions of private and public. 34 Politics and sex are enmeshed in Manley’s Enlightenment Orientalism. The genre of the speculum principis was vital in establishing and continuing this multiplicity of narrative values. The genre can indulge the fear of popular uprising and the coup d’état as a court revolution when the sultan took a new vizier, or when Queen Anne took Abigail Masham as a new favorite and hence disgraced Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. The latter revolution, of an imputedly lesbian betrayal between powerful women, will keep replaying throughout Manley’s work, with Sarah as the controlling mother of Constantine (Anne) in the fi rst volume of Memoirs of Europe and the virtuous Abigail as Theodecta, Constantine’s wife. The loss of royal favor did not just mean a loss of place; as with Turkish viziers, it could mean the loss of life itself, a political downfall that rendered the fallen as spoils to the rabble. The throwaway analogy is to the spectacular popular execution of Johan and Cornelis de Witt by an angry mob in Holland in 1672, leading Manley to joke about whether Madame de Caria might end up being “de-witted” by her disgrace. Or as Manley multiplies her cross-continental references, “whoever knew anything of reading and history failed not to compare [Madame de Caria / Sarah] . . . with Donna Olympia of Rome and wished her the same catastrophe, that is to say, since she had escaped the fury of the rabble, that she might immediately die of the plague, who had been so long and great a plague to others.”35 There is something of a metamorphic aspect to this type of intraEuropean “Orientalism,” whereby metaphors become demetaphorized and the reader no longer distinguishes between sex and politics, plaguing and catching plague, oriental divan and occidental parliament. Manley frequently uses the Turkish term divan for courts and assemblies, saying that Atalantis borrowed the appellation from the Turks. 36 Turkey, Rome, and England merge into one another. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Orientalism is all about infi nite variety and contingent substitutability. The

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

215

genre of the roman à clef is not inferior to that of the realist novel but more evanescent, because the interface between satirical intentionality and secret scandal brings with it a limited shelf life and potency. Some might argue that scandal chronicle is downright claustrophobic and local in terms of its referentiality, rather than expansive in the multilocal and classical sense I am suggesting, but we should not forget that the claustrophobia of such referentiality is a semantic feature of harem culture just as much as of court society, and what is being communicated fictionally is performative just as much as denotative. As such literature made a great impact at the time of its production, it ought not to be placed into timeless aesthetic categories for the appreciation of posterity but needs to be reread with a different attitude. 37 Of some interest for an investigation of Enlightenment Orientalist representation is the obscure text following in Manley’s footsteps that was titled An Account of the Court and Empire of Japan (ca. 1728?). This has been attributed to Swift and was published much later after Swift’s death by a second cousin. 38 The text is one more instance of a transcultural allegory and is reminiscent of scandal fictions such as Manley’s attacks on the duchess of Marlborough or Haywood’s attack on Walpole in Adventures of Eovaai, taken up in the next section. In the manner of the satire of the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians, or Tramecksan and Slamecksan in Gulliver’s Travels, the satire anagrammatizes warring factions of Tories and Whigs as “Yortes” and “Husiges.” George is thinly veiled as “Regoge,” Emperor of Japan, who had succeeded “Nena [Anne], a princess who governed with great felicity.” The archvillain of the piece is, predictably, one “last minister” called “Lelop-aw,” an obvious anagram of “Walpole,” the fi rst minister of the realm and favorite whipping boy for Tory satire. Like the Lilliputian emperor’s dress, this incomplete satire is squarely positioned between “the Asiatick and the European” in the manner of Manley, who was dextrous at eliciting multiple spheres. Robert Markley has discussed in great detail the emergence of Japan and China in the English imagination as a place of anxiety and competition rather than inferior sites that generate a sense of colonial superiority. Writing in the wake of the shifts by economic histories of Asia such as those by Kenneth Pomeranz, Frank Perlin, and André Gunder Frank, Markley suggests that Asian trade struck European merchants as a massive and unsurpassable horizon of mercantilist growth (especially during the early modern period, when Dutch and English traders were competing with each other to make profits along the Indian Ocean and Eastern Pacific seaboard). Several setbacks, including the Amboyna massacre of

216

chapter five

the English and the imposition of the ritual of yefumi or jujika-fumi— through which the Dutch consented to trample the crucifi x before trading—humiliated and alarmed other Europeans, deterring them from assuming natural or colonial superiority. While Manley’s fictions focused on the broader Mediterranean, an earlier study that teases out the Japanese roman à clef allusions within Gulliver’s Travels points out how the iconic figure of the Englishman William Adams (who went native and became an adviser to the shogun from 1600 to 1620) makes its way to many European readers through seminal travel collections including those of Hakluyt and Purchas. Gulliver’s selfaggrandizement and frequent attempts to go native and advise local sovereigns are reminiscent of Adams, even though it might be broadly asserted that Gulliver is frequently enacting an anthropological liminality and rites of passage associated with that framework of levantinization. 39 Gulliver’s transition through each voyage proceeds from curiosity to liminality and reintegration with his new hosts to expulsion by them. The circularity and mutual similarity of the travels (whether Astrea’s two volumes, Gulliver’s four books, or Sindbad’s seven voyages) are to be noted. Gulliver’s voyages end with a systemic failure: he returns home to England from the fourth voyage, physically ejected as before, and this time psychologically unprepared to forgo his fatal identification with the Houyhnhnms. Racehorses were uniquely figured in eighteenth-century England as representatives of Arabian swiftness, as cogently discussed by Donna Landry, and therefore Gulliver’s equine associations make his pathology a metonymic form of Orientophilia. Swift was also clearly alluding to the famous 1590s case of the intelligent horse named Morocco that supposedly comprehended human intentions and answered complex questions—Ben Jonson spoke of “strange Morocco’s dumb Arithmetick.”40 Furthermore, many indirect allegorical allusions to Japan in Gulliver’s Travels may have come from Engelbert Kaempfer’s The History of Japan, which was translated from German by J. G. Scheuchzer and published the year after Gulliver’s Travels but had circulated in manuscript a decade earlier. The Houyhnhnms and the mythical kirin resemble each other, and Gulliver’s impeachment by the Lilliputians is reminiscent of Kaempfer’s rendition of a very similar imperial proclamation in nine paragraphs. Most significant is Swift’s borrowing of a 256-character plate illustrating a Japanese syllabary or Alphabeta Japonum, explained as a sophisticated language-generation computer in Lagado that randomly generates meaningful phrases for notation and study.41 Gulliver visits Luggnagg and Japan during the third voyage and pretends to be a Dutchman while being inter-

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

217

rogated by the shogun. The relationship of European traders to the shogunate was one of abjection—begging for favorable consideration as clients without any social status or military might. Europeans at the Japanese court were treated as exotic pets and dependents rather than social equals. More direct than Gulliver’s antecedents in the historical fi gure of William Adams is the intriguing suggestion by Charles Hinnant that Lilliput, Laputa, and Luggnagg evoke the symbolic structure of Oriental despotism in several respects, with Mildendo’s rigid geometric design—“an exact Square” subdivided into quarters—resembling the orthogonal layout of the streets of significant non-European civilizations, whether this idea could be traced as far east as Kyoto or as far west as Tenochtitlan.42 While the beast-fable aspects of book 4 take us to another kind of Enlightenment Orientalism that was examined in chapter 3, the bureaucratic excesses of Lilliput and Laputa suggest the Oriental despotism that Manley had also evoked, as a representation of the absolutist relationship between state and society, whether chillingly effective as in Atalantis or Lilliput, or speculative and unproductive as in Laputa. The flying island suggests the separation of the court from the country and the detachment of the sultan’s seraglio from the daily life of the people. Going forward from Manley’s and Swift’s to Haywood’s strange oriental tale, it will be clearer how Oriental despotism and fantasy link the Far East, the Middle East, and the British Isles through satirical depictions of corruption and its repercussions.

PRE-ADAMITES AND POST-ORIENTALISTS Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre-Adamitical History (1736), demonstrates the crosscutting of transcultural allegory, political satire, and sexual fantasy through Enlightenment Orientalism. Not all fantasies were Orientalist, but it is no surprise that the Orient was a frequent source of fantasy, given the rich history of the “blind interface” between Asia and Europe. Haywood’s fiction referentializes inexorably, but in a very different way from the realist novel, through satirical, anthropological, and sexual modes rather than through journalistic, historical, or characterological ones. Using Haywood’s wildly fantastical tale we could arrive at newer genealogies of eighteenth-century prose narratives that do not play off realism against fantasy, history against fable, or bounded nations against unbounded fictions. A broader dynamic of prose fiction is visible through Haywood’s use of satire and romance. Haywood’s fiction was written in the 1730s, when Galland’s Mille et une nuits and its Grub Street retranslation had already spawned a large

218

chapter five

number of imitations, parodies, and spurious sequels.43 Popular fiction was still in tremendous flux, as many literary histories of the period attest. Furthermore, according to Jerry C. Beasley, the British 1730s was dominated by the figure of Robert Walpole to such an extent that the First Minister’s notoriety was responsible for the direction of early English prose fiction. Reviewing works lampooning Walpole during his period in office, Beasley sees the greatest criticism of the government arising from works of fiction that were “not what we would call novels.” The most potent vehicles of anti-Walpole fiction were “prose satires in the general manner of Gulliver’s Travels and Jonathan Wild.” Beasley’s essay is notable for its thematic identification of a great number of oriental tales as anti-Walpole satires providing the principal animating energy of fiction in the decade preceding Pamela. These include Lyttelton’s Persian Letters (1734), discussed in chapter 2, and others such as The History of Benducar the Great (1731), Narzanes: Or, The Injur’d Statesman (1731), and Remarks of A Persian Traveller (1736). The trend continued with other notable contributions such as Lyttelton’s The Court Secret: A Melancholic Truth (1741) and The Book of the Chronicles of the Chief Minister of E______d by “Abraham Ben Gorion” (1745).44 The Arabian Nights contextualizes the fictional model behind the 1736 publication of Adventures of Eovaai.45 Scandal chronicle and political satire within the structure of an oriental romance, Haywood’s tale addresses itself to multiple consumers of early eighteenth-century print culture. Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo, ascends to the throne upon the death of her father, but soon after loses a carcanet—a precious necklace or jewel—handed to her by her father on his deathbed. This ornament has served as a talisman ensuring Eovaai’s personal safety as well as the country’s political health. When she loses it, civil war breaks out. She is kidnapped by the evil Ochihatou, prime minister of the neighboring country of Hypotofa. Eovaai nearly loses her virginity to Ochihatou voluntarily when overwhelmed by a “Torrent of Libertinism,” but fortunately for her he is interrupted by affairs of state (46). Ochihatou is forced to take sides in an international conflagration around the princess of Ginsky, Yximilla, whose country is invaded in order to force her to entertain the romantic interest of a neighboring prince, Broscomin, at the urging of more powerful monarchs, Oudescar of Habul and an Amazon-like queen of the Icindas, appropriately named Tygrinonniple. As cautionary contrast to Eovaai, Yximilla cannot resist forever; the predatory Broscomin and Tygrinonniple force her into a nuptial ceremony and eventual rape. Her fleeing lover, Yamatalallabec, enlists the intervention of Osiphronoropho of Fayoul. Soon enough, as in

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

219

the Trojan War, Oudescar and his allies are being opposed by an alliance of other princes headed by Osiphronoropho. The rape of Yximilla, like the attempted seduction of Eovaai or the elopement of Helen in the Iliad, is a sexual spark that has ignited a global political conflagration. Walpole-like, Ochihatou temporizes on a promise of support to Oudescar while keeping his standing army at home to protect himself against domestic unrest.46 With Ochihatou interrupted from impending coitus with Eovaai by Oudescar’s ambassador, Eovaii is in the meantime reprieved by a guardian spirit, Halafamai, who apprises her of Ochihatou’s malevolent intentions through a magical perspective glass and transports her into the remote countryside. There Eovaii fi nds refuge with Alhahuza, a venerable Hypotofan sage who maintains a castle in this region free of Ochihatou’s influence. Eovaai escapes to the neighboring country of Oozoff, where she is regaled with Dutch-like republican sentiments by another sage she meets there, but she is soon recaptured by Ochihatou’s minions and brought back to Hypotofa, where she witnesses ravages wrought by Ochihatou on his subjects. In the ensuing domestic and international troubles, Ochihatou is overthrown in a plot organized by Alhahuza. He thereupon flees to Ijaveo as a vulture, carrying Eovaai (converted into a pigeon) in his beak. The raptor turns attempted rapist again, but Eovaai breaks his magic wand and is promptly saved by Adelhu, son of Oeros and rightful heir to Hypotofa. Adelhu marries Eovaai, thus uniting their kingdoms, a political goal that even the usurper Ochihatou intended to realize. Thwarted, Ochihatou dashes his brains out against a tree. In the manner of the Nights, the actionpacked plot features antirealist narrative devices such as magical ornaments, air transport, supernatural beings, and zoomorphosis.47 The above summary cannot, of course, do full justice to the unfolding of Haywood’s narrative artistry. The interlocking stories suggest the narrative embedding typical of the Nights. Most significant as cautionary tales for Eovaai are interpolations concerning Yximilla, the defenseless princess who succumbs to predatory ambitions on her person and kingdom, and Atamadoul, a noblewoman imprisoned by Ochihatou in the form of a monkey. The story of the loss of Eovaai’s ornament symbolizing good rulership matches the pre-Adamitical story of Soliman ben Daoud, who ascended the throne at the young age of twelve, at which point the Creator is said to have given him command of the winds, spirits, and other elements. This emperor was one of forty (or seventy-two) universal monarchs of the world said to have ruled before Adam, and his story is told in Galland and D’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale.48 Soliman’s ring is taken away from him by a Fury and thrown into the sea (paralleled in Eovaai’s tale by a bird

220

chapter five

who fl ies off with the jewelry). Deprived of the enlightenment (lumières, as Galland precisely indicates) with which he governed, Soliman abstains from ruling for forty days, until the ring is discovered in the belly of a fi sh on his table. Similarly, when Eovaai is reinstated her necklace is returned. “The Story of the Amours of Camaralzaman” in the Nights also involves the theft of a precious cornelian by a bird, an act that separates lovers who can be reunited only after the recovery of the talisman and the resolution of political problems connected to its loss.49 Similar topoi abound in the Western tradition, such as Plato’s The Ring of the Gyges.50 This is the world of romance, but it includes an unstable post-Cervantic mixture of antiromance, parody, and satire, as can be seen in Anthony Hamilton’s posthumously published tales parodying the Nights including Les quatre facardins and Histoire de Fleur d’Épine (1730). The preface, in the manner of hundreds of early eighteenth-century prose fictions, insists repeatedly on terming the ensuing pages faithful “records,” “testimonials,” or indeed a “history” of “adventures” or “transactions” occurring in the past. While this past is formally identified as distant—“a Pre-Adamitical History,” as the novel’s title proclaims (see fig. 5.1)—the satirical context very soon makes the time frame subject to genre-specific hermeneutics for decoding events in the geographical antipodes. As discussed earlier, a parody of theology goes along with Orientalist fantasy. A contemporary theological controversy with anthropological implications is summoned into view by Haywood’s decision to subtitle the fiction A Pre-Adamitical History, referring to late seventeenth-century debates that reopened moot questions concerning biblical chronology. While Archbishop James Ussher had declared after much investigation that the creation had occurred in 4004 BC, a French controversialist, Isaac La Peyrère, suggested in his Men before Adam (1656) that there had been several Adams before the biblical Adam, that the Pentateuch was not authored by Moses, and that the story of the flood and various other biblical events concerned only a local occurrence in the Levant, not the whole world as insisted upon by official Christian doctrine. Best-known for his pre-Adamite hypothesis, La Peyrère was most likely a Jewish Messianist who wanted to announce a common Christian teleology as he attempted to reconcile information about cosmology and chronology from non Judeo-Christian sources. Reconciling incompatible chronologies was a near-obsession in the seventeenth century, when at least thirty-six treatises were published in Latin and French alone attempting to reconcile biblical, Oriental, and pagan chronologies. Galland’s masterly preface to D’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale delineates a history of the

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

221

Figure 5.1. Title page to Eliza Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai (London: Printed for S. Baker, 1736). Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

East that rivals the West’s and thereby discovers new tasks of historical and religious periodization for classical antiquarianism. French Orientalism began a scientifically oriented archaeological phase in the 1630s and 1640s, much earlier than Britain’s. Islamic (and heterodox Jewish) creation myths about pre-Adamites, as well as garbled accounts of vastly incompatible Eastern chronologies—including those from India and China— stimulated

222

chapter five

La Peyrère toward his theoretical reconciliation, which he hoped would grant a limited truth to biblical claims even as it relativized these claims in relation to other cultures. While La Peyrère had to recant in front of the pope after the predictable fi restorm, his ideas had real anthropological consequences.51 According to Richard H. Popkin, La Peyrère’s ideas led to a vast number of polygenist theories of race, making him perhaps the inadvertent progenitor of modern race theory and racism, a veritable “Galileo of anthropology.”52 While it is uncertain where Haywood got her information about pre-Adamites, it might well have been from Marana’s L’espion turc, which went into dozens of editions and discussed pre-Adamite histories extensively. Haywood had already authored Letters from the Palace of Fame (1727) in a style clearly derived from Marana’s. In addition to Marana and Galland, a third Orientalist influence on Eovaai was clearly sinology, all the rage in the 1720s and 1730s in both France and Britain. Rival English translations of J.-B. Du Halde’s Description de la Chine were under way. Haywood’s lover William Hatchett translated and published The Chinese Orphan: An Historical Tragedy (1741), based on a story from Du Halde. The layered textual apparatus of Eovaai makes several references to Mandarin translators and critics within the context of a centralized Chinese imperial academy, a collective entity that is ultimately held responsible for the creation of this work. Eovaai, while originally written in “the Language of Nature,” is supposed to have been translated into Chinese before being rendered into English (xiv). The purported translator is a Mandarin’s son, resident in London and reminiscent of Usbek and Rica, Montesquieu’s Parisian “Persians.” The Chinese intrigue continues the pre-Adamitic obsession: Chinese, as much as Hebrew, was a candidate for the originary language of Noah’s ark, as some euhemeristic accounts including John Webb’s, discussed earlier, had alleged that the post-diluvian Noah landed in China and became the emperor Yao. In the meantime, Crébillon’s supposed Japanese tale Tanzäi et Néadarné had also been translated as The Skimmer (1735). In Crébillon’s text, just as in Eovaai, the tried and tested tropes of the ancient manuscript and the incompetent translator resurface, as well as deliberately bizarre names such as “the Genius Hic-nec-sic-la-ki-ha-tipophetaf,” which was changed because of being “a Horrid Word to the Teeth.”53 Avoiding the superficial aesthetics and glamorization of chinoiserie that was typical of British popular taste in the mid-eighteenth century, which appropriated many things from china to willow furniture while rejecting French Jesuit interest in Chinese language, law, and religion, Haywood conducts something of a precocious synthesis between the earlier

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

223

sinophilia and the existing taste for licentious tales spawned by the Nights. In this regard, the innovations of Eovaai prefigure the relations between the sublime and the pornographic that were explored a couple of decades later by William Chambers, as David Porter has discussed.54 Chambers fi nds sensuality, indulgence, and extravagance in bacchanalian visions of Tartarean damsels, secret grottoes, and exotic animals in his famous Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), and it is tempting to speculate whether he had assimilated something of the spirit of Eovaai in his gambit to strengthen chinoiserie into a more reflectively hybrid aesthetic. The anthropological parody at work in Haywood’s Pre-Adamitical History is by no means obvious: the clues she scatters along the way need to be put to productive use by informed readers. The tale’s important introductory apparatus demonstrates Haywood’s self-conscious craft mediating the transcultural with the translational. The prefatory materials and footnotes, written in the voice of the presumed translator of this discovered history, provide exegetical and metafictional opportunities. Ridicule of pedantry in the prefaces and the footnotes of satires had been made popular through texts such as Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Pope’s Dunciad Variorum, and Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies. As Anthony Grafton observes, Pope, his collaborators, and their intended readers knew the paraphernalia of scholarly annotation well enough to savor detailed, technically adept parodies of erudition. By 1729, when the fi rst version of the Dunciad Variorum appeared, the footnote had already become a Europe-wide fashion, as likely to appeal to a wit in a London coffeehouse as to a subrektor in a Wittenberg Gymnasium. A large and appreciative public could decode erudition’s learned symbols.55 While not to the self-indulgent length and complexity of the Dunciad Variorum, Haywood’s footnotes also function as parodic markers. Orientalist protoanthropology (of predecessors such as Sir Paul Rycaut, Barthélemy D’Herbelot, Antoine Galland, and Jean Chardin) is being targeted in the same way that Scriblerian satires of antiquarianism—such as Pope’s and Swift’s—singled out contemporary Grub Street hacks and scholarly professionals such as Richard Bentley and Lewis Theobald. Haywood playfully demonstrates that Oriental anthropology and fiction are mutually constitutive. The footnote, a frequent explanatory device signaled in the text by the conventional star or dagger, is subject to mild ridicule, especially if Eovaai’s future success is based on “so entire a Dependance on her future Inheritance in that World above the Stars, as neither to be too much elevated or dejected at any Accident below” (6). While this claim is meant at face value in a fiction “where no Descrip-

224

chapter five

tion is attempted of any other World than the sublunary one,” the double entendre concerning above and below in Haywood’s and others’ pseudoOrientalia is just as much one of contrasting spiritual passion and sexual occurrence, authorial power and characterological experience, or fictional license and anthropological truth-claims (xii). In fact, it is worth considering whether the formalization of the double entendre can be read into the naming of Britain as Hypotofa, a realm of corruption and libertinism. The name plays on the idea of rhetorical realism, or painting a word-picture, suggested by the figure of speech of hypotyposis. Hypotyposis is the trope for a different realism, perhaps a wordplay that indicates how reality also strikes (tupein) from below (hypo) in the sense of sexual desire, and the hidden meaning of the anthropological footnote.56 Libertine fictions, as Jean-Marie Goulemot has observed, operate according to their performative impact rather than their formal verisimilitudes. A text invested with erotic desire and longing creates a readerly realism that cannot be reconstructed by an uninvolved observer parsing the text with scientific rules of causality. Using the translator and commentator personae the footnote counters already existing misogynistic interpretations of female sexual agency. Cafferero, a purported ancient commentator who digresses on women’s vanity and intellectual inferiority, is criticized below the line as unacquainted with the advanced learning of European ladies (11, 37). By focusing on this imaginary commentator, the distancing footnote indirectly amplifies the cultural similarities between the fantasy plot and the Walpole era. As did Behn and Manley in their earlier libertine fictions, Haywood demonstrates the proximity—indeed the thorough interpenetration—of sex and politics. Just as Yximilla’s tale is a cautionary one for Eovaai, so also is the interpolated tale of Atamadoul, a bedchamber attendant to Syllalippe, princess of Assadid. Atamadoul, secretly in love with Ochihatou, who had earlier set his sights on Syllalippe, substituted herself for Syllalippe in one of Ochihatou’s earlier attempts at abducting Syllalippe. When Ochihatou discovered his mistaken bargain, he transformed the hapless Atamadoul into a monkey, keeping her chained in his bedchamber so that she could witness his sybaritic seductions in perpetual humiliation. During an attempted rape of Eovaai by Ochihatou, Atamadoul conspires to substitute herself as Eovaai (after Eovaai has uttered the secret formula that reconverts Atamadoul back into a woman). After satisfying his lust with Atamadoul this time around, the misogynistic Ochihatou turns her into a rat.57 The motif of sexual slavery, a neat inversion of the moral attribute of enslavement to the passions, is shown to be very similar to the First Minister’s

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

225

political immoderateness, but it also corresponds with the instant transformation of passion into action characteristic of the Nights. Ochihatou’s affairs of the bedchamber are also typically interrupted by pressing affairs of state: he has to escape Hypotofa with Eovaai immediately after coitus with Atamadoul because of Alhahuza’s sudden rebellion, which reinstates a reinvigorated Oeros. Rather than enacting a sexual economy of desire against abstinence, Haywood’s characters face the inevitability of seduction. Eovaai is subject to a recurring amnesia around her own sexual vulnerability, inviting danger and then attempting to escape it in the nick of time. Having barely escaped the loss of her virginity at Ochihatou’s hands twice, Eovaai is nonetheless convinced by him to bare all on the promise that he will take her back to Ijaveo. In the middle of her inset seduction story, Atamadoul suggestively describes the two-way process of zoomorphosis through incantatory spells: “Behold these Characters engraven by the Fingers of the most subtil Ypres all Caihou affords: These on the Top are to Transform, those at the Bottom to Reform” (156). The interpolation links decipherment to metamorphosis and allows the actualization of word as world. Atamadoul promises the seductive transformations of transcultural fabulism, as well as the political reform sought by a hermeneutics of satire. Fiction remakes the nation by a distorted representation from elsewhere, not only by the mimetic reflections induced by realist fiction. Geographical exoticism and supernatural imagery converge to reveal the surprising insights of pseudoethnography. The deliriously fabulist structure of Eovaai notwithstanding, it reveals a highly self-conscious approach to fiction that is aware of how narrative fulfi lls escapist desires as well as didactic imperatives. Transformation and reformation are also interesting metacritical alternatives for the debate around fictional verisimilitude raging at the time. Haywood demonstrates an unerring capacity to touch on this point, even if glancingly, and it suggests a rubric that epitomizes the dual use of fiction as superficial fantasy and subcutaneous didacticism. Eovaai is revealed to be a deft mixture of political allegory, social satire, and female libertinism. In the manner of several of the voyages in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Eovaai satirizes British politics by choosing an antipodean venue. Parallel to Swift’s significant if imprecise location of Lilliput, Blefuscu, Laputa, and Houyhnhnmland in the Pacific, Haywood’s fi rst footnote describes the kingdom of Ijaveo, “according to a Map annexed to the History,” as “situated near the South Pole: if so, it must be, within a few Degrees, the Antipodes to England, and Part of that huge Continent, now call’d Terra Australis, or the unknown Land” (1). As pre-

226

chapter five

Adamitic utopia, Ijaveo’s past is a remarkable contrast to Britain’s. Ijaveo has had a continuous ruling dynasty for fi fteen hundred years, experiencing “no Wars with foreign Foes” nor disturbances bred by “home-bred Factions,” and its salubrious climate and bountiful produce grant inhabitants longevity and the absence of pain and disease. Eovaai’s father, Eojaeu, warns her against “the false Lustre of Arbitrary Power” and other despotic failings, and likewise schools her in the arts of princely benevolence and good offices. However, following the loss of the talisman and Eovaai’s kidnapping, the plot shifts to neighboring Hypotofa, whose political corruption evokes early Georgian Britain. Ochihatou reminds readers of Walpole, embezzling national funds, building residences for wives and mistresses, raising taxes to fi nance his profl igacy, and manipulating his sovereign, Oeros, who is screened from his own subjects (18–26). But Ochihatou is more than the traditional scheming minister who looks after his own pecuniary interests. The First Minister has created a systemic culture of corruption and place-seeking widely imitated not just in the court but throughout the nation. Written just after Walpole’s unpopular Excise Bill of 1733 and his nonetheless triumphant reelection in 1734, Eovaai satirizes the triumph of corruption, just as Haywood’s earlier Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) criticized the embezzlements of the South Sea Bubble via its depiction of the evil mage Lucitario, who controls an enchanted well. One key identifies Lucitario as James Cragg the Elder, who was eventually prosecuted for his involvement, but Lucitario could very well be the “Screen-Master General,” Walpole himself. While Memoirs of a Certain Island and Eovaai are representatives of Manley’s favorite genre, the roman à clef, their loose structure—involving multiple narrations—resemble aspects of The Decameron as well as the Nights. The personal attack on Walpole is also enlarged politically by making the neighboring Oozoff into a prosperous Dutch-like republic, blessed with a frugal, virtuous, and industrious citizenry. A long political discussion between Eovaai and the ancient in Oozoff reveals the relative merits of constitutional monarchy and republicanism when contrasted with Hobbesian justifications of absolutist monarchy. While Eovaai is later reinstated as sovereign, the idealized renditions of republicanism in Oozoff (and Alhahuza’s cryptorepublicanism in Hypotofa) appear to win the political argument. Alhahuza’s long harangue to the populace of Hypotofa recommending Ochihatou’s overthrow is rhetorically uncontested, and Eovaai acknowledges the greater merit of republican arguments made by his equivalent in Oozoff, to the extent of resolving to integrate them into her own phi-

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

227

losophy. In this centrally placed passage, free of the fabulist excess she indulges elsewhere, Haywood communicates a judicious critical reflection on the flaws of monarchy and court culture akin to the Enlightenment Orientalist allegory presented in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes.58 Eovaai’s fi nal triumph balances Ochihatou’s usurpative hypotyposes (or rhetorical realism) and Alhahuza’s republican prosaics. While Alhahuza does not resemble Defoe (or Bacon or Cromwell) as historical or literary personality, he is something of a Puritan general in his literal-mindedness, though for many of Walpole’s opponents he might well also suggest Bolingbroke’s martyrlike status and exile (disappointed with the opposition’s inability to unseat Walpole in the 1734 election, Bolingbroke eventually returned to France until Walpole’s downfall in 1742). The populism of Defoe’s realist fiction and the elitism of Pope’s verse satire are dialectically integrated by the marriage of Eovaai to the rightful heir of Hypotofa, an imaginative conclusion that is resolutely fictional and national, but that does not resemble the conclusion of the realist novel. Eovaai is sexual but also virginal, mistress as well as monarch. Neither republican nor despot, Eovaai is an Enlightenment Orientalist alternative to verse satire and realist fiction. In a political context where the subject is forced to choose, the fiction allows an inclusive “both-and” rather than an exclusionary “eitheror” logic. We could apply Hawkesworth’s felicitous phrase about the Nights to Eovaai: “though there is not a natural, there is at least a kind of moral probability preserved.”59 Alongside the promise of satirical insight, Eovaai reconfigures the Puritanical “virtue” discourse, as well as the sociological “truth” discourse that inflects accounts of the novel. Admittedly, the footnote fulfi lls a desire for the real in a different way from realist fiction, and with different ends in mind. While the realist novel reconfi rms the sociological texture of the everyday, whether as affect, ethos, or objectification, the pseudoanthropological footnote recites earlier erudition in a manner that profoundly throws epistemology into question but also points to mediated knowledge of a different sort. Yet Haywood’s satire is potentially a nationalizing fiction much as Defoe’s and Richardson’s novels were to become, but simultaneously transcultural in its reach, given that Haywood’s characters referentialize toward multiple locations and thus escape parochial boundaries. The distorted lens of satire makes the same consequence available, even if not by the narcissistic reflection that national realism favors. However fanciful the cross-cultural connections may be, when investigated closely, Haywood’s national satire is formally anchored within international networks of an imagined cultural exchange. Antiquarian

228

chapter five

and Orientalist knowledge enable a premodern cosmopolitanism that illuminates local conditions. Additionally, distance makes the interpretive mediation of fictional distance an overriding and constant fact, in contrast to the supposed transparency given by realist posturing. With antirealist airiness rather than realist substance, the names of the characters frequently follow a vowel-oriented proteanism, promising the liquidity of romance transport as well as satirical transitiveness (as adumbrated in the plot summary above). All the sounds in the name “Eovaai” are repeated in the word that names her kingdom, “Ijaveo,” and this assonance of the monarch’s name in her country’s is reconfi rmed by the fact that she is the daughter of “Eojaeu.” Her precious jewel was made by a powerful genie called “the divine Aiou.” On the other hand, Ochihatou’s aspirate name is echoed in a footnote by a judicious antipodean commentator, Hahehihotu, who laconically criticizes the author of the history for particularizing in such detail Ochihatou’s embezzlements, as it would have sufficed to have just indicated that Ochihatou was a prime minister. These verbal plays demonstrate Haywood’s poetical levity in place of either sociological description or high moral dudgeon. What kind of alternative does a tale such as Haywood’s pose to the canonical eighteenth-century realist novel? Eovaai suggests a different kind of transcultural unboundedness, one created by Enlightenment Orientalism, though the fiction’s vaguer imaginings can be reined in by another move, toward the possibilities presented by national allegory. The fictional structure shifts from that of defi nite historical correspondences, as in the scandal chronicle, to evoking a series of horizontal imaginings and figural deviations. While Behn’s, Manley’s, or even Haywood’s earlier scandal fictions are, strictly speaking, not old-fashioned moral allegories because they resolve themselves into scandal chronicles or romans à clef, Haywood’s transcultural allegory is available but also resistant to decoding in the same way as Gulliver’s Travels. A deft touch with transcultural allegory through Enlightenment Orientalism can be seen even in Fielding’s interpolated tale regarding the encounter of Jones and Partridge with the gypsies, placed suggestively in book 12, chapter 12, at the very end of the “Road” section of Tom Jones. Jones and Partridge, along with their Post-Boy, approach a light and the sound of music in the dark countryside, to the horror of Partridge, who fears witches and ghosts. At this point Fielding’s intrusive narrator reminds his readers that the days of superstition and fairies have long passed and that devils are only stock characters used in theater for the entertain-

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

229

ment of the upper galleries, inhabited by the lower classes, “a Place in which few of our Readers ever sit.”60 It turns out that the hero and his sidekick have blundered into the continent’s aboriginal ur-travelers: “a Company of Egyptians, or as they are vulgarly called Gypsies.”61 The gypsies constitute a utopian society in this description, “subject to a formal Government and Laws of their own,” with the rudiments of republicanism alongside vestigial monarchy. As the narrator says, “Here was indeed no Nicety nor Elegance,” but considerable dignity and the administering of instantaneous justice by the king of the Gypsies, who is more like a republican magistrate than a royal monarch. More than a thousand years ago, the gypsies had overthrown hierarchy, and their new king “had made all his Subject equal vid each oder.”62 The gypsy-king turns out to be a Solomonic magistrate, ruling that Partridge ought to pay a fi ne for attempting adultery with a gypsy woman, but also preventing her husband from profiting from the indemnity, as he had deliberately allowed his wife to pimp her honor for profit. The gypsy-king then tells Jones that the difference between their peoples is that “my People rob your People, and your People rob one anoder.”63 Using this cameo, Fielding contrasts flawed English society with peripatetic Orientals as idealized foils. Ultimately, these antirealist metaphors of “translation,” while introduced by Fielding or Haywood in tones of levity, do salutary work in signaling the hermeneutic task the reader faces. Oriental fable is never far from its potential decipherment via transcultural allegory. History—very much the key term in this early phase of the novel form—is produced by the discovery of ancient records, followed by sober reflection and, when possible, mimetic reconstruction. The reference to ancient records suggests an alternative to presentist and sociologically conditioned fictions. Partisan claims to “history” made by realists demonstrate that realist novels, in their urge to document day-to-day life in the nation, actually turned their backs on both the past and the elsewhere, whereas the transcultural fictions of Enlightenment Orientalism continued to keep those alternate realities in full view. In such a dispensation, hermeneutics is also a matter of uncovering earlier philological stages.64 Haywood’s satire reduces the grandiosity of epistemological truth-claims to pragmatic matters of methodological and editorial competence. As the story goes, the ancient annals had been rendered unintelligible, and a subsequent emperor of Ijaveo had funded an academy of translators for ninety-seven months, one that managed to translate three out of the twenty-one extant “Histories” into various languages; the

230

chapter five

translator has brought “a very correct Copy,” having translated the best of the lot “in gratitude for the many Favours [I have] received from the English” (xiv–xv). Ultimately, the interpretive apparatus in the preface positions the ensuing fiction as Orientalist “history” relayed by an age of “travel” and related by a “translator” keenly aware of hermeneutic displacements. But the irony of inefficiency also speaks volumes. The exceedingly tedious labor of the academy of translators ensures that most decipherments of these Orientalist histories are never going to see the light of day. And perhaps this concession to obscurity is very pertinent advice to the project of recovery that a book such as this one is attempting to perform. Haywood’s translator’s strikingly modern institutional approach, one that could potentially span realist and antirealist, allegorical and fabulist, the novel and romance, is a hermeneutic one, based explicitly in a state-funded project of reconstruction by a translator’s academy. On the other side of this zealous desire for cultural interpretation is the lighthearted hedonism that Haywood continues to indulge. If we could imagine that this very study were to occupy the position of one of Haywood’s pretended translations, taking up cudgels on behalf of forms of fiction ignored in favor of the nationalrealist stereotype, the outcome could only be ironic. Haywood’s fictions are titillating in their pursuit of instant gratification and their licentious representations, and even her more hermeneutic passages are written with the aim to gratify. Insofar as her tale is referential and allegorical, the proponents of national-realist novels could find a number of ingenious ways to reappropriate it for the eighteenth-century English novel. But Haywood’s fiction trumps novelistic realism by resisting the imposition of national-realist boundaries while finding ingenious ways of revivifying transcultural allegory. A postrealist hermeneutics is the only way beyond such partisan reappropriations, especially as national realism gestures toward the parochial totality but cannot represent the transcultural, despite all the claims of modernity and novelty made on behalf of a particular national space.

THE REVERSIBILITY OF REALISM The desire for novelistic realism is a deep-seated one, not just born from the creation of eighteenth-century sociology, the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, and the promotion of nationalism, even though these are defi nite culprits. The drive to realism is also evident in the retroactive pick-andchoose genealogy characteristic of the secularization of Christian figural

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

231

causation, as Hayden White has demonstrated through a careful reading of Erich Auerbach’s magisterial argument concerning the unfolding of mimesis from the Greeks to modernism. Auerbach demonstrates that the teleological desire for mimesis is an idealist and progressive fulfi llment (Erfüllung) at the heart of Western literary history, especially after the inception of Romanticist and modernist historiography. Reality is a prize to be seized retroactively by the hermeneutics of literary history, rather as the typological readings of medieval Christian hermeneutics found their precursors in the Hebrew Bible. However, White notes that this post-Enlightenment desire for realism through figural causation is aesthetic rather than genetic or teleological in the Aristotelian or Newtonian sense of causation: there is a structure of redemption at the heart of the history of Western literature, but “this redemption takes the form less of a fulfi llment of a promise than of an ever renewed promise of fulfillment.”65 It is therefore extremely interesting when Enlightenment Orientalism itself plays with this desire for figural causation, not through the usual realist sociology but in the manner of a theatrical denouement (the gothic genre then inherited some of these tendencies from the more self-conscious versions of the oriental tale). Manley’s and Haywood’s innovations fi nd their culmination in a masterful text that manages both realism and allegory to demonstrate the multiple possibilities of Enlightenment Orientalism’s fictional genres. Discussing Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad, an anonymous early twentieth-century critic wrote that “Mrs. Sheridan wrote a real Arabian night” and that the tale was specifically much more evocative of Galland’s collection than oriental tales by her contemporaries such as Johnson’s Rasselas.66 Through this tale, Sheridan explores the generic reversibility between oriental adventure and domestic realism—and between xenotrope and chronotope.67 Sheridan had initially planned to publish The History of Nourjahad, along with a series of other fictions, as moral tales dedicated to the prince of Wales, but she died before she could accomplish this goal. Her story’s “royal ethics” echoes—even if unintentionally—early predecessors of The Arabian Nights such as Kalila wa dimna.68 The story enacts some moral commonplaces and was abridged and illustrated as a children’s tale subtitled as The Folly of Unreasonable Wishes. Nourjahad was twice adapted for the stage in 1802 and 1813. The original novella was published through at least eleven editions from 1767 to 1830 and was also translated into a number of European languages, including French, Russian, and Hungarian. In this discussion of Nourjahad, I will highlight the interactive reversibility of the fiction’s narrative and dissertative aspects—or its plot and its moral—as White uses these terms.

232

chapter five

Structuralist narratology, such as Vladimir Propp’s discussion of the folktale and Tzvetan Todorov’s speculations on predicative fiction, will also be useful reference points to understand the formal elements of Sheridan’s fiction as offspring of the Nights.69 Nourjahad is a favourite of Schemzeddin, twenty-two-year-old sultan of Persia who has just ascended the throne. “Desirous of promoting his favourite” to be his vizier, Schemzeddin consults with four old counselors about his fitness for the job.70 To his disappointment, the gray eminences caution Schemzeddin about Nourjahad’s youth, avarice, hedonism, and irreligiousness. In a memorable homoerotic scene the young Schemzeddin, “with an assumed levity, throwing himself down on a bank of violets, and familiarly drawing his favourite to sit by him,” begins to interrogate Nourjahad (25). Asked hypothetically what his wildest wishes might be, Nourjahad wishes for inexhaustible riches, unmitigated pleasure, and eternal life. He is banished from the sultan’s presence. That night, a guardian “genius” (or genie, in today’s terms) appears to Nourjahad and offers to fulfi ll all his desires, while cautioning him to consider the consequences (fig 5.2). Despite being told that he will suffer bouts of sleep that might last for years at a time if he overindulges, Nourjahad accepts. Given a vast treasure, the hedonist goes about refi ning his pleasures in sex, gastronomy, and music. Nourjahad appoints Hasem as a trusted director to his household and falls in love with Mandana, one of the beauties in his newly acquired harem. He is summoned before the sultan to respond to rumors regarding high living and excessive wealth. Upon confessing to living it up based on a genie’s boon, Nourjahad is coldly disbelieved and dismissed. Confi ned to his estate by the sultan, Nourjahad launches into another orgiastic round of pleasures. But then he suffers the curse of prolonged sleep for his drunkenness; he awakens after the passing of four years and twenty days. Once Nourjahad recovers from his disorientation, he discovers from Hasem that the harem favorite, Mandana, has died in childbirth leaving him a son. Yet another interview with Schemzeddin plunges Nourjahad into greater disfavor, and he decides to move quietly with his entourage to a country estate. Here he indulges in a travesty of ideas sacred to Islam by pretending to be the Prophet Mohammed with his wife Cadiga in paradise, surrounded by beauties resembling houris. The celestial masquerade results in Nourjahad’s being punished by another long sleep—this one lasts forty years and eleven months. When he awakes once more, Hasem is no more; Cadiga, now an old woman, has taken his place as director of the household. In the meantime, Nourjahad’s son by Mandana has run away after attempting to rob

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

233

Figure 5.2. Frontispiece to Cooke’s edition of Frances Sheridan, History of Nourjahad (London: Printed for C. Cooke, 1798). Image reproduced with permission from the University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.

his father of his riches. Tastes have changed; he is unable to stock his harem with fresh beauties to his liking. Nourjahad strikes a remonstrating Cadiga dead, as he grows peevish, morose, and cruel from the deadening effect of pleasure. He is condemned to fall asleep for another twenty years and wakes up to meet Cozro, Cadiga’s brother. This is the point of Nourjahad’s anagnorisis, when he undergoes a reformation of his lifestyle in conversation with the highly moral Cozro. Nourjahad is persuaded to spend his wealth on good works rather than

234

chapter five

physical pleasure. Both Cozro and Nourjahad get into trouble with the officers of the new sultan, who is Schemzeddin’s son, for violating curfew during the mourning period with their philanthropy. Nourjahad is willing to go to the scaffold in defense of his good works. Furthermore, he implores the prophet Mohammed to take back the gifts of eternity and unlimited riches. At this point, it is revealed that the timeline of “sixty-four years” had been a clever trick imposed on Nourjahad over the course of fourteen months by Schemzeddin, who reemerges from death, as do a host of other characters. Mandana had played the role of Hasem, and the sultan himself the role of Cozro. The coffers of treasure were fake coins produced by the sultan for the sake of the moral experiment. Having voluntarily moderated his passions, Nourjahad is rewarded by having Mandana restored to him. Schemzeddin appoints him to the position of vizier, the ultimate reward for which he had previously been unfit but for which he has now been eminently seasoned. Subject to a sting operation involving elaborate theatricals for fourteen months, Nourjahad has been living in a simulated reality. As Hamlet might say, the play is the thing wherein (he will) catch the conscience of the king, except here the king catches the conscience of a potential minister in order to reform him. Sheridan’s fiction reflects many of the techniques she had perfected as a dramatist. Moral absolutism and emotional authenticity dominate the narrative: Nourjahad’s desires have to be spoken as an inner truth that leads from the hypothetical context of its elicitation: “Tell me, Nourjahad, and tell me truly, what would satisfy thy wishes, if thou were certain of possessing whatsoever thou shouldst desire?” (25, italics in original). Once he has spoken in accordance with the truth of his desire, he is trapped by the official discourse of social norms he transgresses. Nourjahad walks into this moral trap and is led through a convoluted plot intended for his edification. The reason that oriental tales such as Sheridan’s are just as important as novels for scholarship on nationalism and the history of the novel, then, is that they perform functions of withdrawal, exchange, and porous identification as important as the functions performed by realist novels. Chronotopes especially are translated through the vehicle of narrative, perhaps in the manner of the memes that have been identified by sociobiologists as the cultural material that passes across generations. The translatability of narrative is what allows it to form a metacode, in contrast to other forms of literature, such as poetry, that are much less translatable. Furthermore, as White has argued, “narrativizing discourse serves the purpose of mor-

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

235

alizing judgments.”71 Distinguishing the narrative aspect of a story (its plot) from its dissertative aspect (its extrapolated and moralizing message), White argues that no narrative is innocent. If Nourjahad inhabits the narrative function, or the plot of his history, in White’s sense, the sultan, the moral paragon, occupies the enunciatory aspects of the dissertative function, the ultimate moral drive of the fiction. To impose the requisite moral ideals, the sultan adopts an elaborate and inauthentic subterfuge. In contrast, after being asked to own up to his fantasies, Nourjahad is subjected to a literal wish fulfi llment and the moral recoil of such an actualization. In the violent wrenching apart of the plot from the moral, the adventure narrative is fulfilled as an emotionally charged domestic fiction. Time has to be elongated artificially so that Nourjahad can learn the lessons of experience well before he grows old—that would defeat the purposes of the sultan, who wishes to reprogram him as a competent vizier by speeding him through an artificial simulation. The “royal ethics” of the speculum principis has been turned on its head, as the king has to tutor the minister. As in all sting operations, fantasy has to be invited into reality. Solicited intentions are allowed to proceed toward criminal acts, and are punished accordingly once they have done so. Vladimir Propp’s category of the character-function as he analyzed it in the folktale is most efficiently applicable to this story, and the concepts italicized in the paragraphs that follow are all Propp’s categories.72 The superficial structure of this oriental tale resembles that of the indigenous folktale; the elements of narrative reversal are embedded within the same character-functions and will eventually unfold when subjected to a dissertative cue. Nourjahad undergoes distanciation from himself in the initial situation by expressing his immoral desires; he suffers an interdiction from the sultan upon their revelation; he transgresses the interdiction by persisting in his desires; he interrogates the genie about the possibility of granting his wishes; the genie informs him of the means of success. However, while Propp suggests the presence of the true hero and the false hero in the folktale, Sheridan splits Nourjahad to fulfi ll parallel characterfunctions of both hero and antihero. The antihero’s character-functions of perfidy, involuntary complicity, ill deeds, and imposture are performed within Nourjahad’s mental framework, even as crucial functions of the hero, such as moral decision, elimination of evil, transfi guration, and punishment of the hero, turn out to be self-infl icted. While it might appear that Sheridan has successfully converted the action-oriented exteriority of the Nights (discussed in the introduction with reference to Todorov’s provocative interpretation) to bourgeois inte-

236

chapter five

riority by changing the dissertative value put on the narrative component of the character-function and running the story back on itself in reverse, what is ultimately revealed is bourgeois outcome more than the construct of bourgeois subjectivity. The didactic adventure fable exposes its obsession with end-orientation. Objective conditions, such as being made to fall asleep and the loss of key members of his entourage, entirely determine Nourjahad’s change of heart. Hedonistic self-indulgence miraculously turns into philanthropic altruism. All the action-oriented wonders are dissolved by the sultan’s realist explanation of every imposture through a reversal of the wave of the magic wand, and what remains in place of the miracle is a cheap bag of tricks, as with Ann Radcliffe’s version of the gothic. Oriental despotism and the concept of Islam as religious imposture could very well have been on Sheridan’s mind: her husband Thomas Sheridan’s career as manager of the Smock-Alley Theatre in Dublin was ruined more than a decade earlier when a riot broke out during his production of an English version of Voltaire’s Mahomet the Impostor and his family subsequently had to leave Dublin.73 Theatricality replaces narrativity when the oriental illusion is unmasked for the audience as domestic morality tale: hence the successful adaptation of Nourjahad for early nineteenthcentury melodrama. Certain crucial Proppian character-functions—such as mediation, donation of the magic elements, and transportation of the hero from one realm to another—are theatricalized through and through by the sultan. Schemzeddin (who stands in for the authorial function of the theatricalizing apparatus) ends up dissolving the supernatural miracles into a secular moral realism. It appears to Nourjahad as if he were making decisions, departing, and eliminating evil, yet all these actions are proceeding transitively as character-functions of the apparatus policed by Schemzeddin as absolute master. As a character, Nourjahad believes in his hedonistic interiority, whereas in fact he is entirely manipulated according to Schemzeddin’s moral reform agenda. Escapism has been trumped by philanthropy, as the sultan is a Christian moralist in disguise. The transcoding of Nourjahad’s life by the moral at the end of the plot is unified with another moral revealed within the story, when Nourjahad edges toward philanthropy and reform. The move to philanthropy redeems Nourjahad, even as it subtly positions itself as an antipolitics to the sultan’s writ. The emergency relief of the poor, planned by Nourjahad, and executed by Cozro (the sultan himself), takes aim at the external moral rigidity of a period of mourning for the supposedly dead Schemzeddin and violates it so that the poor do not starve. Moral norms are allowed to transgress legal injunctions that stand in their way. The sultan as Cozro col-

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

237

ludes with Nourjahad against the pretended edict of his own son Schemerzad, who supposedly mourns his father. If the idea of a lecherous sultan is a characterological point of no return—the absolute dissolute as it were— Sheridan’s sultan is, as apparatus, forced for reasons of narrative impulsion to motivate a whole range of characters to act on his behalf and generate actions. The sultan, in addition to being chief director of the imposture, turns out to be an actor of many principal roles. He plays himself, his own son, and Cozro, and also provides sound and lighting effects at certain key moments, while assisting with casting and issuing constant stage direction. The sultan as theatrical director is also a model for the narrator of the realist novel, who enacts a performative despotism. The sultan’s actions suggest the puppet-theater characteristics of what Bakhtin called the “intervalic chronotope”—where Nourjahad’s life as a hedonist becomes a suspended interlude that interrupts the moralizing chronotope of the main narrative. As a result, what develops is a hybridization of time-spaces, both the Oriental and the national, in a manner that changes the meaning of each of the chronotopes and their interaction with reality. While critics such as Ian Watt argue for a return of romance after the installation of formal realism so called (Thomas Pavel plots this as the return of moderate idealism following the anti-idealist change), it is more accurate to assume that neither had romance gone away nor had realism been born ab ovo.74 Also reminiscent of aspects of the adventure chronotope, Sheridan’s tale features the entirely technical, abstract connection between space and time, the reversibility of moments in a temporal sequence, and the interchangeability of these moments in space. One kind of adventure novel identified by Bakhtin, of “endurance,” characteristic of the Greek romance, is converted into another kind, of “becoming,” seen in the chivalric romance’s embrace of chance and ultimately the eighteenth-century novel’s embrace of modernity.75 A novel of ordeal, Nourjahad is magically converted into Entwicklung or bildungsroman through its operating in double time. In this hybridization of chronotopes, the highly artificial, simulational model of the intervalic chronotope is made to confront the naive structure of the travel novel and the novel of ordeal in which the hero moves through space. Sheridan’s achievement is a metafictional allegory that makes a mockery of the division of supposedly realist and fantastic genres. By initiating a switch between supposedly realist and fantastic modes, the intervalic chronotope produces an implicit critique of the national-realist novelistic form. The concentric diegetic worlds of the novella are cut open by the dissertative function. While the dissertative function appears at its conventional point, at the conclusion, it also inte-

238

chapter five

grates itself with the goals of national realism, whereas the narrative function is much more visible at the beginning, where it can be related to the model of a predicative literature. Oriental stories that begin as predicative and without apparent consequences turn moral and national. Nourjahad has moral outcome without interiority, having started as a febrile Persian tale designed for pleasure and without much promise of a powerful conclusion. Sheridan’s sultan is a busy one, taking on the functions of the vizier while getting Nourjahad up to speed. This is in contrast to the conventional myth of Oriental despotism, in which sultan is replaced by vizier so that the absolute master can be left to enjoy his dissolute excesses. In this story, the sultan turns into a moral sage, as the vizier has to be coached by acting out a fantasy of being the hedonistic sultan that he normally could never be.76 Within this ironic reworking of the genre of the speculum principis (normally picturing the education of a young prince by a wise mentor), a young sultan takes elaborate measures to prepare his friend for the job of his deputy. It is as if the prince and the adviser of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas had changed places: Nourjahad appears to be a hedonistic version of Prince Rasselas and Schemzeddin a more active variant of the Imlac figure. And if it appeared at the end of Nourjahad as if the oriental adventure were the fantasy inside national realism, the vizierlike sultan along with the sultanlike vizier in Sheridan’s version of Enlightenment Orientalism reveals the reversibility and substitutability of Oriental despotism and domestic realism as narrative apparatus, especially when viewed through the Bakhtinian category of the intervalic chronotope. Actually, the nationalrealist tale is the fantasy within the fantasy, or the special-case fantasy of the story of daily life inside the compendium of tales both marvelous and ordinary. Sheridan has anticipated some of the structuralist insights concerning Orientalist fiction avant la lettre. Even as the moral analysis of her story implicitly critiques national realism, it explicitly substitutes the antipolitics of philanthropic donation for individual hedonism. Nourjahad’s hedonistic adventure has taken place in exactly the manner of Bakhtin’s description of adventure, namely as an “extratemporal hiatus between two biological moments,” but also in the manner of the intervalic chronotope that throws the entire genre system into question.77 The communicative function of Nourjahad thus works through various codes, such as the narrative and the dissertative, and performs various character-functions whether communicational, allegorical, or identificatory. In terms of compositional strategies, we can begin to think about the way that chronological and nonchronological configurations of plot

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

239

work, as crossing points between national temporality and extranational narrativity through a double time structure. Sheridan is but one example of the more general tendency exhibited by the eighteenth-century French and British literary imagination to oscillate between the historical and nonhistorical aspects of cultures: historicity is not the same as chronology, and identity is not the same as experience. All fictionalization regarding pleasure and wonder—oriental or otherwise—involves a necessary nonrelation between context and text. A distanciation from the reader creates new channels for different as well as familiar modes of identification. Alongside the broader genres of the adventure tale, Enlightenment Orientalism enables cultural exoticism and domestic realism to exist side by side, to enable the cultural diplopia that Harry Harootunian describes, when a national cultural imaginary stereoscopically puts together multiple chronotopes and xenotropes. If prosaic allegorization is indeed the novel’s innovation, as Bakhtin argues, “novel” is not just domestic realism but all the intersecting forms of fantastic and realistic narrative extant at various times. Nourjahad’s exemplary systematization of the reversibility between the oriental tale and national domestic genre reflects back on the writings of Galland, Manley, and Haywood to alert us to the deeper premises of the genre system. Where multiple genres circulated with temporal indefiniteness and generalized ambiguity, the mechanisms of national realism anchor a particular historicism as the ground of referential elaboration, thereby overplaying a parochial and exclusionary script. Alternative possible worlds ended up being slotted into secondary positions as figurations of the “merely” fantastic.78 But just as fantasy and reality jointly make up the world of the fictional imagination, the Enlightenment and the Orientalist dimensions, taken together, create fluid generic outcomes. Nourjahad presents itself as the perfectly protean text that rewrites transcultural allegory and national realism in terms of each other.

TRANSCULTURAL DELIRIUM The chapter’s discussion of transcultural allegory concludes with a brilliantly playful text that is virtually unreadable except by the eighteenthcentury specialist, given its recondite references: Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), which claims to describe events in Japan a thousand years ago as narrated to the brain of a London haberdasher called Nathaniel Peacock.79 Smollett’s text borrows from Marana’s pseudoethnographic L’espion turc and his successors Montesquieu

240

chapter five

and Goldsmith, as well as Crébillon’s The Sopha and other it-narratives indebted to vaguely Eastern doctrines of transmigration. In the manner of Manley’s or Haywood’s texts, Atom participates in the scandal chronicle that is a feature of earlier French texts including Roger de Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1660) and Alain-René Le Sage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707). Atom is a satire of court intrigue, using an arcane allegorical language that ceaselessly fi nds translingual and cross-historical references between Oriental ancient history and contemporary British politics. Relentlessly exposing politics and posteriors, Smollett’s fiction is described by its editor as “by far the most scatological work in English literature.”80 Smollett, like his contemporary Laurence Sterne, is indebted to the modernizations of Menippean satire, which scholars have identified as an ancient source that levels all comers, namely the twin tradition of Rabelais and Swift that Bakhtin seized upon to express some of the vitalist impulses present in his dialogically capacious (rather than only nationally realist) novel. While Sterne’s scatology in Tristram Shandy takes a rather erudite turn as he indigenizes the interruptive interpolations of The Arabian Nights, Smollett’s burlesque fiction refers to the seething excremental obsessions of the visual print satires of the 1760s.81 A more immediate source for Atom was John Shebbeare’s The History of the Sumatrans (1762–63), which attacked successive Whig ministries with an Orientalist allegory.82 The atom, resident in his host’s pineal gland, originates in Japan a thousand years ago, until, “enclosed in a grain of rice, eaten by a Dutch mariner at Firando, and becoming a particle of his body, [it is] brought to the Cape of Good Hope.” Upon coming there, the atom reports in its own voice, “I was discharged in a scorbutic dysentery.” Following various vicissitudes the atom is digested by a duck, later eaten by Nathaniel Peacock’s father. Eventually ending up in the haberdasher’s brain, the atom dictates stories concerning its Japanese origins that are meticulous allegorical renditions of the reign of George II and his succession by George III. The reader hears of court politics around the Seven Years’ War and accounts of the ostracism of the Scots by the English, and follows the rise and fall of the ministerial political personalities of the time. The larger basis for the allegory consisted in Smollett’s extended comparison of Japan and England, published in the Critical Review: Japan might be aptly compared to Britain and Ireland . . . subjected to the domination of one monarch. . . . The coasts of Japan are dangerous and rocky; so are those of Great Britain. The climate of Japan is

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

241

wet, stormy, and variable; so is that of Great Britain. Both countries produce great quantities of corn. . . . There is moreover, a resemblance in the genius and disposition of the people: the Japanese, like the English, are brave and warlike, quick in apprehension, solid in understanding, modest, patient, courteous, docile, industrious, studious, just in their dealings, and sincere in their professions. The resemblance will likewise hold in their vices, follies, and foibles. The Japanese are proud, supercilious, passionate, humourous, and addicted to suicide; split into a multitude of religious sects,83 and so distracted by political factions, that the nation is at least divided between two separate governments.84

Smollett makes the obvious comparison that will develop from this: the Chinese empire, on the Asian mainland west of Japan, was the equivalent of France, with its material ostentation and military might. National character will transpose itself as a version of Franco-British rivalries: “The Chinese are more gay, the Japanese more substantial . . . the Chinese are remarkable for dissimulation, complaisance, and effeminacy; the Japanese are famous for their integrity, plain-dealing, and manly vigour.” If Japan stands for Britain and China for France, Korea signals Spain.85 The Hanoverian dynasty, featured by the white horse of Brunswick, is suggested by “the temple of the white horse,” or “Fakkubasi,” a derivative of Indic and Buddhist myths concerning white horses. George I, who brought the Hanoverian dynasty to England, is given a fitting equivalent in the Japanese Bupo (butsu or Buddhist law-giver), who was said by the Universal History to have landed in Japan . . . from the Indies . . . on a white horse.”86 One of Smollett’s main targets is the earl of Newcastle, the First Lord of the Treasury, represented by “Fika-Kaka,” a version of the Japanese emperor Go-Fikakusa but also a contemptible rendition of Italianate scatological misogyny.87 With obsessive prurience, Smollett renders Fika-Kaka as enjoying the pleasure of being arse-kissed by multiple courtiers. Here Smollett picks up from Diderot’s sexology in Bijoux to explore the way scatology exposes social hierarchies. The fi rst time Fika-Kaka proposes having a client pay his respects, “the proposal was embraced without hesitation . . . the osculation itself was soft, warm, emollient, and comfortable; but when the nervous papillae were gently stroaked, and as it were fondled by the long, elastic, peristaltic abstersive fibres that composed this reverend verriculum, such a delectable titillation ensued, that Fika-Kaka was quite in raptures.”88 Smollett ferrets out amazing translingual parallels between Japanese

242

chapter five

imperial history and eighteenth-century British politics. The duke of Cumberland, second surviving son of George II, and the martial victor of Culloden, is “Quamba-cun-dono” (reminiscent of Kampaku-dono or “regent” in Japanese, a name that sounds eerily similar to Cumberland) but is also, given his later corpulence, called “Fatzman” which corresponds to “Fatsman, the Mars of the Japanese,” also discussed in the Universal History). The earl of Bute is “Yak-Strot,” a version of Jack Scot that manages to signal strutting Stuart affiliations. With similar brilliance, the earl of Hardwicke, responsible for the post-1745 repression in Scotland, is a scatological “Sti-phi-Rum-Poo,” and William Pitt, the fi rst earl of Chatham, is the Japanese “Taicho” or sovereign lord who gets his way politically by manipulating the mob, or “Blatant Beast,” with the help of his ally, the fabulously wealthy mayor of London William Beckford (“Rhum-kikh,” alluding to his Caribbean sugar plantations). With his Scottish sympathies, Smollett is especially caustic about the prejudice exhibited by the English (“Niphonites”) against the Scots (“Ximians”) and the barbaric punishments meted out to the Culloden rebels in 1745, who appear to be slaughtered for meat in Smollett’s fiction in a manner that echoes Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”89 Smollett cleverly modifies many of the names of Japanese emperors listed in the Universal History to correspond to various English equivalents, but perhaps his best pun is his naming of George II “Got-Hama-Baba”—suggesting Japanese emperor Go-Taba but also the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha, and also “Gotham baby” (England’s sovereign). The sovereigns of Japan, known as the dairos, were analogical equivalents of English monarchs, ciphers who were held hostage by their cuboys or shoguns, fi rst ministers who wielded the real political authority while the sovereigns possessed only the trappings.90 The involved political allegory in Atom is quite familiar to us from Manley and Haywood, with the exoticism of the superstructure clearly linked to the sordidness of the base. The central core of dignified national realism is gutted, making way for a combination of airy and ethereal Japanese references that are just the cover for a debased and excremental British reality. What kind of response to realism is this combination of the excremental-as-British content and the nominal-as-Japanese form? With this secret history and libertine scatology, Smollett continues to explore Enlightenment Orientalism as a weak counterforce providing comparative alternatives to national realism, not in terms of a greater universalism but as a terrifying mass of linguistic puns, deliberate obfuscations, and unreliable interpretive keys, tools also used by Manley and Haywood. Smollett adds brilliant rhetorical asides on breeches (as does Sterne in

The Oriental Tale as Tr anscultur al Allegory

243

Tristram Shandy), metempsychosis, language, magic, alchemy, music, and onomastics. To the extent that promoters of national realism were seeking to establish a secular religion in the genre of the realist novel oriented toward modernity, the scatological Orientalism of a text such as Atom is a blasphemous and counterproductive structure, sounding alternatives that parody the mainstream while aspirationally oriented toward other languages and admixtures.91 Many of these forms of prose satire, from Manley and Swift through Haywood and Smollett, are broadly seen as Tory in their thrust, but to be more accurate, this satirical mode uses the cross-cultural comparisons enabled by Enlightenment Orientalism to display a general disgust with eighteenth-century party politics and the rise of exclusionary national cultures. Fictional excess transcends reality transculturally rather than just subordinating itself to literal-minded existence. Atom still engages with contemporary national reality as its conceptual raw matter. Fiction distorts, perverts, and subverts immediate facts in an imaginative drive toward satirical laughter and anal-erotic pleasure, converting abstract politics into the psychopathology of everyday life and making heady references to other spaces and places that are not mere vehicles but fantastic alternatives and virtual associations. The prudish bourgeois orientations of a developing national realism dissolve into the adolescent madness of an Enlightenment Orientalism combining genius and lunacy, insight and delirium.

Conclusion

Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell. —Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

W

alter Benjamin’s essay on Nikolai Leskov, the Russian storyteller, reflects on the major shifts in modern subjectivity that take place as minds and bodies are traversed by narratives in peasant and illiterate settings, and then later within urban and literate environments. Benjamin’s evocation of Leskov reveals the relationship between domestic realism and foreign fantasy in European fiction and hence is a relevant theoretical meditation to consider at the conclusion to this book. According to Benjamin, the foundations of subjective experience today have been straitjacketed by modern warfare, economic inflation, media saturation, and a new moral politics (144). Human beings, always vulnerable to displacement, disruption, and death, lose their ability to drink from the common well of communitarian experience. As the communicability of experience decreases, alienation sets into motion new versions of privacy. Hence for Benjamin the realist novel is no great progressive teleology but a regression from a rich experiential world that is lost, reminding us of Lukács’s notion of the genre as constituted by its “transcendental homelessness.”1 Benjamin’s reiteration of rural community and his Rousseauistic evocation of storytellers passing along oral histories—which had been passed on to them—is set in the slow time of peasant labor and involves weaving, winnowing, spinning, and other mechanical activities that numb mind and body into self-forgetfulness, as “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (149). This archaic boredom is the most receptive mental condition for the listener.2 Like a bobbin, the listener is a relay point in a process of transmission, unconsciously absorbing the story244

Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

245

telling technique as much as the story’s content. Within this rural environment, Benjamin finds boredom to be “the apogee of mental relaxation,” constituting the building block of the best kind of story (149). Yet even in the peasant world, there are two kinds of storytellers who cross over the listener’s consciousness in the manner of the warp and weft of a weaver’s shuttle. There is “the settled tiller of the soil,” reconsolidating local tradition and serving as the chronicler of daily life, and his rooted task is interrupted by the “trading seaman” who brings talk of other places and spaces, including uncorroborated marvels that float in without roots and then disappear across the horizon (144). Enter Sindbad. There is a clever textual synthesis that Benjamin proposes regarding the peasant’s warp and the the seaman’s weft. The “interpenetration of these two archaic types” occurs with the expanding trade of the Middle Ages: “the resident master craftsman and the itinerant journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been an itinerant before he settled down. If peasants and seamen were masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university” (144). 3 Benjamin imagines storytelling as artisanal communication superior to the later mode of the novel that readers devour out of their profound internal emptiness. He evokes the importance of traders in the art of storytelling: “Their task was less to increase its didactic content than to refi ne the tricks with which the attention of the listener was captured. They have left deep traces in the narrative cycle of The Thousand and One Nights” (157). To the masculine figures of the master craftsman and the journeyman seaman we have to add the feminine, indeed protofeminist, figure of the spinner of tales, whether the Penelope of the loom that gets woven by day and unwoven by night as she waits for the return of her prodigal husband, or the fast-talking tale-spinner Scheherezade, who gets a daily reprieve from her husband’s murderous intent when he succumbs to his curiosity for narrative completion. Benjamin’s idea of unalienated production is undoubtedly a Romantic projection concerning medieval life, in which economics and culture miraculously coincide, melding shop and ship, textile and text, tiller and teller. Stories were inextricably connected with the working ethos, shuttling between the exhaustion of the working body and the vacuity of the bored mind. The severing of the bond between craft and story and the rise of leisure as the motivating cause of narrative eliminated the selfforgetfulness that was storytelling’s psychological ground. The rhythm of work had made the gift of retelling come all by itself, or at least that is the tale about telling that we are told. Modern information replaces epic intelligence according to Hippolyte

246

Conclusion

de Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro: “To my readers . . . an attic fi re in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid” (147). Modern novelistic information is shot through with explanation that constitutes weakness rather than strength. Novelistic narratives are analytical regarding detail and hence already spent, whereas ancient stories preserve their power by their gnomic silence, closely guarding their interpretive possibilities for future generations. Benjamin’s brilliant commentary on the story of the Egyptian king Psammenitus when defeated by the Persian king Cambyses, one of the logoi from Herodotus’s Histories, is a case in point (148). The contingent details of a story—in this case how the defeated Psammenitus beat his fists against his head in despair when he saw an old servant taken away in chains, but maintained an expressionless demeanor previously when seeing his daughter being treated as a maid and his son taken off to be executed—have great germinative power. The usefulness, practical value, and moral precept contained in a story link back to its status as a fount of experience. A story with “chaste compactness . . . precludes psychological analysis” (149). As listeners we must guess: did Psammenitus grieve for the servant because he was a truly innocent victim when compared to his children who had to suffer anyway, given that they possessed his royal blood? Or was Psammenitus identifying with the old man on generational grounds, having remained detached from his children’s humiliation and murder? Or is the reader’s confounded expectation deriving from the fact that modern individuals assume that one’s children ought to precede servants as targets of empathy? The story is silent about any such literary, social, or psychological analysis and does not situate itself within a discourse. But wisdom is gained upon reflection, squeezing the juice of the story out of its parabolic structure, rather than by encountering explicit didacticism in stories functioning as educational tools within the modern culture of explanation and justification. Causal accounts are multiple, but the pure story provides none. Ancient stories sought to perpetuate themselves through tricks that captured the listener’s attention, rather than with second-order commentary. “Counsel woven into the fabric of real life [gelebten Leben] is wisdom,” whereas “the birthplace of the novel is the individual in his isolation . . . who himself lacks counsel, and can give none” (146). Such reflection could indeed be put together with Todorov’s speculations on the transitivity of the action-oriented oriental tale, potentially contentless in terms of depth and subjectivity but narratively generative into self-expended actions. Benjamin’s idea about the story as parable is one approach to the question that seems invested in the superiority of “poetic” over “prosaic” nar-

Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

247

rative. Oriental tales, while not always parables in the sense that Benjamin explores in the above analysis, do not need internal explanation and external justification the way novels do, but because the fact that their creators do not wear their heart upon their sleeve and shout their theory of the world from the rooftops in the manner of a bourgeois arriviste does not make them inferior forms of fiction. Similarly, Benjamin’s distinction between the eschatological chronicler and the profane storyteller potentially maps onto the distinction that emerges between the realist novelist and the fantastic Orientalist. To narrate without explanation is sublime, whereas to narrate and explain at the same time makes fiction literalminded and flat-footed. While emergent nationalist values favor the scientific historian and the novelist as empiricists, the profane power of the storyteller and the romance writer destabilizes these explanatory forms of cultural hierarchy. Rather than obsess about why we got to be who we are, as novels do, oriental tales tell us about others elsewhere. To call this escapist or fantastic is to assume that reality is only the here and now— and that is solipsism; history also teaches us that reality is a condition of many times and places. Where the novel promotes the centralization of one nation and features one individual whose biography it will pursue single-mindedly, storytelling worlds are plural, composed of many peoples and multiple lives (154). Oriental tales participate in a different time of fullness and faraway intelligence. “A story . . . does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long time” (148). A mystical communion with the gift of community, an old-fashioned story cannot be a perishable commodity in the manner of a novel. The storyteller’s audience is composed of listeners who share; in contrast, novel readers devour their materials, testifying to the lost world of oral communication and the emergence of the novel as commodity (156). The oral is bucolic, the written neurotic. The novel stands for the epic bereft of intelligence, an ontological fallenness, and perhaps in Benjamin’s argument a fall guy for the missing plenitude of rural society. The Lukácsian formula of the novel’s transcendental homelessness opposes the Whiggish bravado of the novel as a perpetual rising, whether of individualisms, middle classes, or nations. The novel’s apparent dependence on the technology of the book is a fundamental failing for Benjamin’s romantic conceptualization. However, oral epics appear to need no technical support only if we can believe that the storyteller’s skill is nurtured by living traditions and that mnemonic techniques serve adequately for oral recall.4 Benjamin’s Romantic reverie on the Middle Ages can be brought for-

248

Conclusion

ward to the genre interaction of realist novels and oriental tales even though these modern fictions of the eighteenth century are largely produced neither by peasants nor by seamen. At least two kinds of narratives regarding self and other are on offer, though the narratives about others turn out to concern a surrogate self. Narratives about selves are further revealed to be endlessly abstract and pointless, subject to a ruthless internal criticism, sometimes with morals, proverbs, and practical conclusions, and occasionally ending with the tragedy of the solitary individual and his or her incommensurability with society and everyone else, all the way down from Don Quixote through Robinson Crusoe to Madame Bovary. For Benjamin, a story is about the unforgettable, and this ontological content emerges at the moment of someone’s death: “What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about” (156). The death of a human being at a young age retroactively reinflects all the living memories of that life with the premature end that it met; in that sense, “death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell” (151). What comes to mind for Benjamin is Scheherezade, the quintessential Orientalist storyteller who represents the antithesis of the novel as such, as every story emerges in exactly the same way as every other, a memorable yarn to be spun out just before dawn when her execution, and the end of the story-world itself, is nigh. Yet each story staves off death and postpones the real as an anticipation of death; Scheherezade’s continual and interlocking narrative is the ransom that buys time, life, and the sovereign reprieve, suspending a real-world death for a story-world life (154). The equilibrium of the oriental tale emancipates and then compensates; the novel, however, only compensates while appearing to emancipate. The counsel of the storyteller is always available through the oriental tale, but there is another twist: the oriental tale only simulates the kind of timeless rural story that Benjamin celebrates. Though Benjamin’s romantic projection raises a whole host of problems, his focus on mode rather than genre—storytelling in general rather than novel writing in particular—allows us to discern a way forward for a transcultural and diachronic analysis of fiction without the crutch provided by modernity theory and avant-gardist progress narratives. Print culture brings along product advocacy and overstated claims of novelty. Did fiction always need a marketing campaign to spell out its importance, or were there other ways it absorbed its audience that can still be relevant for us today? The novel as demiurge for nationalism, individualism, and cognitive advancement has reached a real impasse after the explosion of photography, narrative cinema, and new media. While reading is not dead,

Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

249

its relationship to visuality leads to a reprise of the way the oral was configured in relation to the written, and debates about the origins of fiction and the novel’s suppression of rival claimants appear increasingly like a dust-up about provenance at an antiquarian swap meet. Enlightenment Orientalism of the eighteenth century was a recently rediscovered form of fiction, contemporary with the realist novel but crafted with the folktale and other archaic modes in mind. Exactly in the manner that Galland’s likely invention of the Ali Baba and Aladdin stories fits the bill of eighteenth-century individualism using medieval motifs, the oriental tale simulates older models just as distressed furniture mimicks real antiques. Oriental tales simulate actual folktales and oral literature but are circulated and disseminated through print just as novels. Evoking other times and places, they plant remembered pasts. Could it be that Oriental tales revivify dying oralities? Repetition and retention in the oriental tale replace topicality and explication in the realist novel, and that might provide a new interface between telling and writing on the one hand and listening and reading on the other. Genealogical forms of reading have increasingly enabled affiliative rather than constitutive accounts of genre. Such accounts should allow us to pick our way through the legacies of complex intellectual histories, whether that of Enlightenment or of Orientalism. Whether or not the demise of oral storytelling is about the decline of everyday wisdom and communicable experience as Benjamin thought, it is clear that this perceived passing—real or imagined—cannot be replaced entirely by the bourgeois realist novel. There has to be a substitution to placate the hankering for orality, but, paradoxically, also in a written and a readable form. Hence the rise of Aesop’s fables, Mother Goose stories, indigenous fairytales, and oriental tales, all of which jostle and compete with fictions of domestic individualism. In this sense, the storyteller is always “someone who has come from afar,” as Benjamin says, and Huet similarly imagined stories as having traveled to Europe, the western parts of the Eurasian landmass, from the East. James Joyce’s writings can illustrate this generativity between the near and the far that Benjamin identified as largely lost by the end of the nineteenth century. Joyce’s Irishness is perhaps more noticeable in the later twentieth-century context, but his acceptance as one of the most canonical writers of Anglophone (if not exactly British) modernism demonstrates that nonnative writers can participate and be integrated very easily in a national literature and even be produced as exemplars—witness Conrad, who is not often treated as a Polish writer. Given his awareness of Ireland’s

250

Conclusion

colonial history, Joyce artfully integrates the national and imperial with its obverse, the Oriental and exotic, from a transcolonial vantage point that repeats the format of the English novel with an indication of the outside that it elicits, but also simultaneously suspends and withholds. “Araby,” an early story in Dubliners, plays on the sense of the Oriental as a kind of suspended or borrowed time that represents a yearning for escape from the grayness of wintry northern Europe. The story ends up reinforcing the claustrophobic interiority of the Irish colony.5 “Araby” refers to an Irish Victorian bazaar in 1890s Dublin that hawked “Oriental” goods through various stalls with names such as “The Eastern Temple,” “Algericas,” and “Arabian Nights.” In the manner of Nourjahad, Joyce’s “Araby” confuses sexual desire with Orientalist pleasure. The adolescent narrator of the story is infatuated with Mangan’s sister, who, when she ultimately speaks to him, asks him if he is going to Araby: “It would be a splendid bazaar she said; she would love to go.”6 Following this exchange, the lovesickness of the narrator is metonymically shifted onto Araby: “At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar Saturday night.”7 Ultimately wrangling permission and spending money from a forgetful uncle, the narrator gets to the bazaar when it is about to close. The magical time has already passed, and the narrator feels overwhelmed by anguish, anger, and loss. The moral blindness he feels at the end of the story suggests a lack of access to the uplifting aspects of the national-realist as well as the Enlightenment Orientalist modes. This lack could be attributed to the Irish colonial context, which is assimilable neither to Britishness nor to an alternative Oriental sensibility that is also wholly other. If “Araby” touches on the contentless romance of the Orient, the passage at the very end of “Ithaca” in Ulysses explores the possibilities of a “predicative” literature (à la Todorov) within interior domestic fiction when Bloom fi nally returns home to bed by Molly’s side after his Nighttown revels. This chapter generates narrative as cumulative detail in response to pointed interrogative questions: Womb? Weary? He rests. He has travelled. With?

Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

251

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer. When? Going to a dark bed there was a round square round Sindbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? •8

At this moment in the book, the free, indirect rendition of Bloom’s consciousness formally comes to an end and Molly’s internal monologue begins. Molly, as a modern-day Scheherezade, performs a nocturnal streamof-consciousness narrative that transitions life from one day to the next. Undoubtedly an important narrative transition in the text despite its nonsensical repetitions, this passage also represents an allegory of form. Here, narrative production integrates the chronotopes of Oriental adventure and domestic fiction. The alliteration of naming and vocation—Sinbad the Sailor, Tinbad the Tailor, Jinbad the Jailer, in response to the question of “With?”—evokes the endless machine of travel literature from The Odyssey onward that generates output even as the rules are slightly changed to accommodate “Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer” as the nonalliterative last four after eleven alliterative names and vocations. A calling out of narrative subheadings is followed by a formalistic reversal. The reader assumes that Bloom thinks of the square around the roc’s auk’s egg and then fi nally collapses in sleep to the typographic symbol of the dot as the still point of origination. Whether or not he has actually ordered eggs for breakfast, Bloom’s return to the womb (of domestic fiction?) at break of day to the thought of Darkinbad the Brightdayler is followed by Molly’s (formally hysterical) monologue that summons thoughts of Scheherezade and anxieties concerning narrative and human continuity. The womb speaks, and a dialogue of interior monologue challenging idealist narrative follows. Joyce’s Scheherezade dreams from her bedstead, with teller and witness lying beside her, demonstrating the metafictional structure of situation, enunciation, and addressee (see fig. 1.3 in chapter 1). The Sindbad story brings together two of the most significant books in Joyce’s library. Homer’s Odyssey and Burton’s translation of The Ara-

252

Conclusion

bian Nights come together, as odyssey and araby. There are, of course, numerous allusions to Irish Orientalism and The Arabian Nights in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.9 The Arabian Nights is never far from the allusive surface of these texts: from the comparison of Bloom to Sindbad the ancient mariner in front of the Irish National Library to the Haroun al Raschid and Sindbad pantomimes in Bella Cohen’s brothel and elsewhere in Ulysses; from the deliberate confusions of Erin’s round towers and Iran’s round Zoroastrian towers to the Ossianic and oceanic oral performance in Finnegans Wake. Joyce renders the myth of the Celtic-Phoenician connection broached by the fanciful theories of Orientalist Charles Vallancey in his Trieste lectures as well. Joyce’s references to The Arabian Nights are transcultural topoi, from the carnival in Dubliners to Ulysses as the European book of the day, to the suggestion that Finnegans Wake, modeled on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is the global book of the night. After all, Mille et une nuits is about the relationship between travel and home, adventure and the bedchamber, kinesis and stasis. So is Ulysses. For that matter, Joyce’s “all including farraginous chronicle,” in terms of its transgeneric voraciousness and stylistic tonalities, also does what Burton’s translation performs.10 In Joyce’s texts, the focus shifts from various negotiations around translation to the way the text figures as if already translated, while it cites other cultural artifacts such as Nijinsky’s dance of Scheherazade. From the nursery rhyming of nomination and vocation in the Sin(d)bad passage in Ulysses, Finnegans Wake takes us through a “thousand one nightinesses” to the sexualization of the smallest units of language—“between his voyous and her consinnantes,” “allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths, lesbiels, dentelles, gutterhowls, and furtz.”11 Putative translation or allusive half-translation and double entendre are to function and figure more powerfully than would an actual original-language text or full-fledged translation. The massacre of the Barmecides elicits its own response of sympathy through the sounding of the word itself in its new spelling— “barmaighsighed.” Scheherazade becomes Skertiraizde, Zobeide becomes Creamkins, and Haroun-al-Raschid becomes Haromphrey.12 Galland’s transculturation initiates a prosthetic structure of representation between a translation and an original that is carried through just as much in relation to Homer’s original and Joyce’s transcreations. A deferral of the original into a less familiar language to the Europeans of the time is reined in under the familiarity rules of propriety, or bienséance, by Galland, let loose pruriently in all directions by Burton, and radicalized into modernist experimentation by Joyce.

Sindbad and Scheherezade, or Benjamin and Joyce

253

Just as nobody can listen to all of The Arabian Nights and live, so the superstition goes, no one can recount all the consequences it had, and continues to have on subsequent literature, and now on narrative cinema and new media. Translation in the service of bureaucratic imperial rule is the debased version we know as Saidian Orientalism, whereas transculturation in intercultural mixture goes by the name of traveling theory, a xenophilia that stands as a placeholder for a “positive” Orientalism.13 While the interpretation of imperialism needs a theory of the literary as well as the geographical contact zone, the use of linguistic and cultural detritus does not just mechanically cite earlier injustices but also sheds responsibility in delirious transculturation. Odyssey and araby are mutually constitutive—the return home creates responsibility and repetition, while the desire for the other is also the hope for the outside, which, however commodified, symptomatic, or stereotypical, remains utopian. The proliferation of The Arabian Nights makes sure that future generations will not forget the narrative aspirations it represented in its initial phases of transmission, aspirations that still continue to be evoked when it is studied today. These longings for a literature that would somehow evade cultural straitjackets and sociological determinations, like Scheherazade’s hope for more than a day’s survival, managed to transport her audience elsewhere even while she was under the sentence of death. Could we consider the sultan’s injunction to be the equivalent of the norms of narrative realism and national referentiality, and Scheherezade’s narration as the reprieve of transculturation, or indeed the purposive fantasies of Enlightenment Orientalism as they have been plentifully evoked in the preceding pages? Rather than foreshadowing a history of the modern novel teleologically, or backshadowing it retroactively, oriental tales considered at their moment of impact can reveal how different forms of narrative have been suppressed or forgotten because of recently acquired chronocentric, national realist, and xenophobic norms. By honoring the fl intiness of fiction as heralding an affiliative and translational mode, we can take a path into genre history that does not have to pay obligatory obeisance to modernity theory. Not just a rationalization of the present, Enlightenment Orientalism brings to life the conjectural, the counterfactual, the transcultural, and the cosmopolitan.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 204. 2. See Judith N. Shklar, “Politics and the Intellect,” in Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 94. 3. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. See Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 595. 5. For a very interesting dissertation that takes up this question, see Humberto Garcia, “Islam in the English Radical Protestant Imagination, 1660–1830” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007). 6. Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Siskin and Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 14. 7. See John Guillory, “Enlightening Mediation,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Siskin and Warner, 62. 8. See Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, “Some Answers to the Question: ‘What Is Postcolonial Enlightenment?’ “ in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Carey and Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–36. For my contribution to this volume, see Srinivas Aravamudan, “Hobbes and America,” 37–70. 9. For a general defi nition of Orientalism in literature and the arts, see my article,”Orientalism” in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of British Literature, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 143–50. 10. The analogy would be with the general status accorded to poetry by Philip Sidney as opposed to the particular status accorded to history. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

255

256

Notes to Pages 6–11

11. I recommend those who have investigated this field and already staked important positions, including Martha Pike Conant, Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, Lisa Lowe, Balachandra Rajan, Madeleine Dobie, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Laura Brown, Ros Ballaster, Robert Markley, David Porter, and Nigel Leask, whose books I largely appreciate, and with some of whom I also occasionally disagree (see bibliography). I have chosen not to encumber this book with the baggage of reviewing all the recent secondary literature, but for my opinions on some of these predecessors, please read my book reviews of monographs on literary Orientalism by Balachandra Rajan, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, and Ros Ballaster, listed in the bibliography. 12. Obviously there are significant exceptions to the nation-based paradigm of novel studies, as I discuss shortly. 13. See Balachandra Rajan’s review of my earlier study Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) in Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2001): 71–74. I have also learned tremendously from the provocations of Franco Moretti and the vast global history of the novel that he has launched, which has had a remarkably salutary effect on breaking down the nation-based parochialism of novel studies. However, Moretti has no time for the oriental tale or for the critical interpretation of individual fictions, except as exemplary of very large trends that can be followed through their tropological and formal analysis, and this is of a piece with his grand narrative of intellectual diffusion with Europe as the core. See Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998). 14. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, “Introduction: Approaching Enlightenment Exoticism,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. Rousseau and Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 4, 14. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. I drop two of Said’s original adverbs concerning Orientalism and the Orient: “militarily” and “scientifically.” 17. I am deliberately parodying and also refunctionalizing Said’s oft-quoted paragraph that is present in the opening epigraph. The purpose here is dual—redefi ning the objectives of Enlightenment Orientalism while setting it off from Said’s claims about generalized Orientalism, and also demonstrating how Enlightenment Orientalism is a mock Orientalism that precedes (but does not necessarily cause) the rise of Orientalism “proper,” in Said’s sense. 18. See David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a very interesting article situating world literature in the transnational Islamicate sphere in response to Moretti, Damrosch, and Casanova, see Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010): 458–93. 19. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-King and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Said endorses this translation with a highly laudatory introduction. 20. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Lettre-traité de Pierre-Daniel Huet sur l’origine des

Notes to Pages 11–14

257

romans, ed. Fabienne Gégou (Paris: Nizet, 1971 [orig. 1669]), 51; Antoine Galland, Les paroles remarquables des Orientaux (Paris, 1694), n.p., quoted in Jean-François Perrin, “L’invention d’un genre littéraire au XVIIIe siècle: Le conte oriental,” Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux, XVIIe-XIXe siècle 2 (2004): 10. 21. However, we need to move the debate beyond monolithic accounts of Orientalism that suggest that all forms of cross-cultural knowledge are tainted by fl awed epistemologies and political biases because they are advancing the project of an imperial state, and reactionary counterattacks such as those against Said by Bernard Lewis, Robert Irwin, and others, that rather naively celebrate Orientalism by deeming its practitioners high-minded individuals who were diligent, conscientious, and erudite. See Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2007). 22. See Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 136. 23. Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 2, 4. 24. See Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 11; Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Jonathan Burton, “Emplotting the Early Modern Mediterranean,” in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21–40. Adding even greater complexity to this picture, Bernadette Andrea brings attention to the continuing effacement of women’s agency in scholarship on early modern literature and the Islamic world. See Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 25. Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 463–82. 26. Some of the materials in this paragraph were suggested by a wonderful exhibition, curated by Timothy Billings at the Folger Shakespeare Library, titled Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550–1700, exhibited from September 18, 2009, to January 9, 2010. Walton also published an introduction to the study of oriental languages titled Introductio ad lectionem Linguarum Orientalum. 27. See Rachel Ramsey, “China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s An Historical Essay . . . ,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 483–503. 28. See App, Birth of Orientalism, 30. 29. William Temple, Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 42, 57, 40. 30. Ibid., 105–6, 133. 31. Ibid., 133, 134. Temple’s celebration of the pleasurable asymmetrical aesthetics of Chinese gardening as deriving from an untraced concept he designates as sharawadgi continues to be the subject of speculation by contemporary scholars studying early modern sinology. 32. For a comprehensive analysis of this rich tradition, see Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).

258

Notes to Pages 15–19

33. See G. A. Russell, “Introduction: The Seventeenth Century; The Age of ‘Arabick,’ “ and Vivian Salmon, “Arabists and Linguists in Seventeenth-Century England,” in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 1–19, 54–69. 34. See G. A. Russell, “The Impact of the Philosophus autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends,” in “Arabick” Interest, 224–65. 35. See Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 635–36. 36. See Nawal Muhammad Hassan, Hayy Bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe: A Study of an Early Arabic Impact on English Literature (Baghdad: Al Rashid House for Publication, 1980). 37. See The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Don Juliana de Tuzz (London, 1722); The History of Autonous (London, 1736); John Kirby, The Capacity and the Extent of the Human Understanding (London, 1745); and The Life and Surprising Adventures of Don Antonio de Trezzanio (London, 1761; repr. 1766). 38. See G. Z. Atal (G. A. Russell), “Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan: The First Psychological Novel,” in Texte und Kontexte: Studien zur Deutschen und Vergleichenden Litteraturwissenschaft, ed. M. Durzak, E. Reichmann, and U. Weisstein (Bern, Switzerland: Francke Verlag, 1973), 9–27. 39. Muhsin Mahdi, ed., The Thousand and One Nights: Alf Layla wa-layla from the Earliest Known Sources (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984–94); Margaret Sironval, “Métamorphoses d’un conte: Aladin français et anglais” (PhD diss., University of Paris III, 1998); and Aboubakr Chraïbi, “Galland’s ‘Ali Baba’ and Other Arabic Versions,” Marvels and Tales 18, no. 2 (2004): 159–69. 40. See Rebecca Carol Johnson, Richard Maxwell, and Katie Trumpener, “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel,” Modern Language Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2007): 243–79. 41. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 100–113. 42. Thomas Pavel, La pensée du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); and Thomas Pavel, “Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 201–10. 43. Thomas Pavel, “Fiction and Imitation,” Poetics Today 21, no. 3 (2000): 521–41. 44. See notes 13 and 18. 45. See Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 337. I’m all for counterintuitive claims, but while I fi nd this claim bold as a thought-experiment I ultimately disagree with its conclusions. Gallagher’s essay tautologically assumes what needs to be proven by staying with canonical eighteenthcentury novels for its evidentiary basis, repeating at a higher remove the argument Richardson had with von Haller, which the essay usefully discusses. 46. There are several instances of earlier theorizations that group fictions together, even if not under that word, and in any case, if this kind of descriptivist nominalism were the sign of novelistic originality, then it too would fall by the wayside under the same rule, as the novel was not named as such until Walter Scott’s time, as Homer Obed Brown argues (and therefore novel functions as an anachronistic and retroactive

Notes to Pages 19–24

259

designation). See Homer Obed Brown, Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 47. Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 340. 48. Ibid, 346. At this point, the Marxist methodologies metamorphose into New Historicist homologies. 49. For Gallagher, characters in novels are best regarded as imaginary nonentities (Bentham) who begin to function in the manner of Freudian fetishes. Fictional characters become static and knowable (despite plural interpretations), unlike realworld individuals, and the novelistic character becomes a crutch for the fashioning of a modern subjectivity that could always transcend the limitations of fictional character. The novel’s special claims on fictionality ultimately represent a self-aggrandizing and fetishistic project of the modern subject, who wishes to declare the novel the only fictional game worth playing in town, even as the epistemological and moral truths that it would supposedly deliver are jettisoned for a narcissistic glorification of the subject’s own “idealized immanence . . . without textuality, meaningfulness, or any other excuse for existing.” Gallagher, “Rise of Fictionality,” 361. 50. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 30. 51. See Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 34, 36. 52. Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 53. See Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759), 53. 54. See Robert Miles, “Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation: The Case of the Inner Stranger,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Siskin and Warner, 176. Miles relies on Charles Taylor’s account of the progression from a “porous” self to a “buffered” self. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2007). 55. Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times, trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 56. For Aristotle it was not just fantasy that was unreal but imagination, association, memory, anticipation, reason, deliberation, desire, action, passion, dreams—all being mental states that can diverge from reality. 57. See note 40. 58. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 81. 59. See Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, “The Poetry of Mediocrity,” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 75–76. 60. John Hawkesworth, The Adventurer, November 18, 1754, 68. 61. Nancy Armstrong, “The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism,” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 350. 62. Luiz Costa Lima, “The Control of the Imagination and the Novel,” in The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Moretti, 64.

260

Notes to Pages 24–34

63. Ibid., 66. 64. My sarcasm aside, cognitive studies in this area have much to offer even if I disagree with the universalist arguments put forward by such approaches. See Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Lisa Zunshine, ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 65. Maximillian E. Novak, “Some Notes toward a History of Fictional Forms: From Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 6, no. 2 (1973): 120–33. 66. A. S. Byatt, “Narrate or Die: Why Scheherezade Keeps On Talking,” New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999, 106. 67. See Sieur Du Plaisir, Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l’histoire avec des scrupules sur le style (Paris, 1683); John L. Sutton Jr., “The Source of Mrs. Manley’s Preface to Queen Zarah,” Modern Philology 82, no. 2 (1984): 167–72; and for an important discussion in relation to English novel theory, Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 110–17. Du Plaisir was also paraphrased in the second letter, “Sur l’histoire,” in Abbé Morvan de Bellegarde’s Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale, also published and translated into English the same year as Manley’s novella. For discussion of Bellegarde, see Rachel Carnell, “More Borrowing from Bellegarde in Delarivier Manley’s Queen Zarah and the Zarazians,” Notes and Queries 51, no. 4 (2004): 377–79. 68. Sieur Du Plaisir, unattributed preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, by Delarivier Manley (London, 1705), [2]. 69. Ibid., [4]. 70. Ibid., [10]. 71. François Pétis [de la Croix], Turkish Tales (London: J. Tonson, 1708), n.p. 72. See Samuel Humphreys, translator’s preface to Thomas-Simon Gueullette, Peruvian Tales, trans. Samuel Hymphreys (London, 1734), xii. 73. Anonymous, “Preferatory Discourse on the Usefulness of Romances,” in Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s Mogul Tales, or the Dreams of Men Awake (London, 1736), viii. 74. Ibid., viii–ix. 75. Ibid., x. 76. See Thomas Pavel, “The Novel in Search of Itself,” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 3–31.

CH A PTER 1 1. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), a canonical text. 2. Michael Holquist, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 31. 3. Homer Brown reveals very clearly the generic irony at the heart of the problem: “Why the Story of the Origin of the (English) Novel Is an American Romance (If Not

Notes to Pages 34–41

261

the Great American Novel),” in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 11–43. 4. The English novel serves as a subordinate guarantor of the stability and clarity of the internal and interning (or as Margaret Doody mischievously puns, the “nationally in-turned”) logic of the English novel. Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 292. 5. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 6. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 250. See also Srinivas Aravamudan, “Refusing the Death of the Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 1 (2011): 20–22. 7. See Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews, in Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3; and Tobias Smollett, dedication of The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (London: T. Johnson, 1753), v. 8. See J. Paul Hunter, “The Novel and Social/ Cultural History,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9–10; John Richetti, introduction to Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1. 9. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59, 412–13. 10. See Mary Helen McMurran, “National or Transnational? The EighteenthCentury Novel,” in The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 53. 11. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Traité de l’origine des romans (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1670), 4, translation mine. There were two English translations of Huet, the fi rst by Roger L’Estrange, A Treatise of Romances and Their Original (London: R. Battersby, 1672); and the second by Stephen Lewis, The History of Romances: An Enquiry into Their Original (London: J. Hooke and T. Caldecott, 1715). While I have consulted both the L’Estrange and the Lewis translations, I have decided to provide my own renderings from Huet’s seventeenth-century French. Peggy Kamuf calls anatopism Huet’s poisoned gift—appearing to credit the East but doing precisely the opposite. However, Huet’s belief in Eastern origins is no throwaway—he needs to position the East’s fiction as the fount of the West’s. See Peggy Kamuf, “The Gift of Clothes: Of Mme de Lafayette and the Origin of Novels,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 17, no. 3 (1984): 233–45. 12. For a full survey, see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 13. See R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 12. 14. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 65. 15. See Brendan Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and also Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

262

Notes to Pages 41–49

16. Marana, general preface to Letters Written by a Turkish Spy Who Lived Fiveand-Forty Years Undiscovered at Paris, 8 vols. (London: Vernor and Hood, 1801), 1:iii. Later references are cited in parentheses in the text. 17. Jan Lavicka, “L’espion turc, le monde slave, et le hussitisme,” XVIIe Siècle 110, no. 11 (1976): 75–92; and Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 154–62. 18. Lenglet du Fresnoy, De l’usage des romans (Amsterdam, 1734), 2:84–85. 19. See Louis Moréri, “Marana,” in Le grand dictionnaire historique, ou Le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane, ed. Claude-Pierre Goujet and François Drouet (Paris: Les libraires associés, 1759), 7:188–89; S. F. Shimi, “Portrait d’un espion du XVIIè siècle,” Les Lettres Romanes 35, no. 1–2 (1981): 129–43; and Guido Almansi and Donald Warren, “L’esploratore turco di Giovanni Paolo Marana,” Studi Secenteschi Rivista Annuale 9 (1968): 159–83. 20. William H. McBurney, “The Authorship of The Turkish Spy,” PMLA 72, no. 5 (1957): 928; Joseph E. Tucker, “On the Authorship of The Turkish Spy: An État Présent,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 52 (1958): 44; Jean-Pierre Gaudier and Jean-Jacques Heirwegh, “Jean-Paul Marana, L’espion du grand seigneur, et l’histoire des idées,” Études sur le XVIIIe Siècle 8 (1981): 25–51; Joseph Tucker, “The Turkish Spy and Its French Background,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 32 (1958): 74–91; Gwyn A. Williams, “Prince Madoc and the Turkish Spy,” Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 1982, 1415–16; and Donald Warren, “The Turkish Spy,” Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1983, 701. 21. Speaking of Istanbul, he says: In describing this imperial city, I have imitated the painters, who, when they would draw a beauty to the life, do not go arithmetically to work, or observe any order in their rough drafts; but following the conduct of a wild and strong fancy, they dash their pencil here and there, as that volatile faculty inspires them, regarding only the symmetry of the picture, without preferring one part to another, or being curious in delineating every little singularity: So I, in pourtraying this queen of cities, this superlative beauty of the whole earth, draw my strokes at random, not designing to present thee with an anatomylecture over her, or to unveil all her interior secrets, but only to give thee a transient view of those parts which appear most eminent, and attract the eyes of all travellers; and this I do not perform all at once, (it were too great a task) but even like them, by fits and starts, as I fi nd my opportunities. (8:100–101) Various modes of realism are compared in the above passage, even as the purposive use of one kind (presciently suggestive of impressionism) is both justified and enacted. At the same time, the pressing realities around these set pieces are about a European seventeenth century that has been reeling from various religious wars. The hermeneutic rift between the alienated spectator and his two worlds (because the world he reports to is quite different from the one he reports on) results in confl ict, anguish, and deviousness, and indeed a third space for subjectivity that is neither that of the spy’s disguise nor that of his deeper affiliation. The many class levels of the spy’s interlocutors and addressees makes for a social cross-section cut across the boundaries between social

Notes to Pages 49–52

263

elites and anonymous individuals. Readers can revel in information about the sultan’s seraglio in Constantinople, the costs of necessities in Paris, and the numbers of coaches to be seen in the streets. Mahmut’s foreign letters form individual elements in a medley or miscellany, mixing surveillance-related objectives with disinterested observation. 22. See G. L. Van Roosbroeck, “Persian Letters” before Montesquieu (New York: Publications of the Institute for French Studies, 1932). Other candidates are Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century “Original Man,” or Philosophus Autodidacticus; Honoré Bonet’s fourteenth-century Apparition Maistre Jehan de Meun; and Ferrante Pallavicino’s Il courriere svalligiato (1643). 23. Josephine Donovan has identified this combination of hypotaxis and parataxis in the protofeminist novelle of Christine de Pisan and Marguerite de Navarre. See Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 132–41. 24. Frédéric Hitzel, “Les jeunes de langues de Péra-les-Constantinople,” Dixhuitième siècle 28 (1996): 69. 25. Perrin, “Invention d’un genre littéraire,” 14. 26. Said’s delineation of four stages involved in the transmission of ideas from one context to another might be worth considering: “First, there is a point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse. Second, there is a distance traversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence. Third, there is a set of conditions—call them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances—which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be. Fourth, the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place.” See Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–27. Those who (like me) do not possess linguistic competency in Arabic and Persian rely on the extant Arabist scholarship to ascertain the translated text’s prehistory while attending to the latter three stages identified by Said: the distance traversed since the genesis of the idea, the new conditions of acceptance and resistance for its spread, and the ultimate transformation of the idea (or in this case, story collection). 27. Nabia Abbott, “A Ninth Century Fragment of the Thousand Nights: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8, no. 3 (1949): 129–61. 28. For a good discussion of the origins, see Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (New York: Penguin, 1994); André Miquel, preface to Les mille et une nuits (Paris: Pléiade, 2005), xi–xlvi; and André Miquel, “The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society,” in The “Thousand and One Nights” in Arabic Literature and Society, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6–13. 29. See Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, eds., The “Arabian Nights” Encyclopedia (Oxford: ABC-CLIO Press, 2004), and Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishi, eds., The “Arabian Nights” and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West (London:

264

Notes to Pages 53–54

Tauris, 2006). These texts are useful for their discussions of the supplementary influence of the Nights on Arab and world cultures, whereby a popular and largely oral form has entered literature in a dramatic new way after a detour through Europe. 30. See Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); and Sahar Amer, Ésop au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 31. See Madeleine Dobie, “Translation in the Contact Zone: Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuits: Contes arabes,” in The “Arabian Nights” in Historical Context: Between East and West, ed. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 29. As Dobie says, “The quest for ‘untainted’ Arabic sources is also problematic to the extent that it negates the significance of intercultural translation that occurs—as it often does—in a messy, discontinuous way, rather than as the result of a single, serendipitous act of exchange” (37). 32. Antoine Galland, epistle in Les mille et une nuits: Contes arabes traduits par Galland (Paris: Garnier, 1988), xxx. 33. See André Miquel, “Naissance, éclipse et résurrection,” in Mille et un contes de la nuit, ed. Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, Claude Bremond, and André Miquel (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 22. 34. Eva Sallis, Sheherazade through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the “Thousand and One Nights” (Richmond, VA: Curzon, 1999), 5. 35. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, introduction to The “Arabian Nights” in Historical Context, 3. See also the discussion of The Arabian Nights by Robert Mack in Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3: 470–76. 36. Within the terms of French literature, Galland’s style is often characterized as more properly “seventeenth-century” rather than “eighteenth-century.” Correspondingly, bienséance (or aesthetic propriety) mattered much more to him than vraisemblance (or verisimilitude). The term for the text’s genre, ‘aja¯’ib (marvels, wonders, or astonishing things), and another Arabic term communicating wonder, ta’ajjub, correspond loosely to the Latin equivalent of mirabilia. According to Roy P. Mottahedeh, the intensification of a’jab and ghara¯ba (or wonder and defamiliarization) in the work is performed through the textual repetition at key moments of adjectives such as ajı¯b (astonishing) and gharı¯b (strange), and also by the allegorical naming of characters (for instance, the third dervish in “The Tale of the Porter and the Two Women” is actually called Ajı¯b). Roy P. Mottahedeh, “‘Aja¯’ib in The Thousand and One Nights,” in The “Thousand and One Nights” in Arabic Literature and Society, ed. Hovannisian and Sabagh, 29–39. See also André Miquel, Un contes des “Mille et une nuits”: Ajîb et Gharîb (traduction et perspectives d’analyse) (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). 37. Arthur J. Weitzman, “The Oriental Tale in the Eighteenth Century: A Reconsideration,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1843. 38. Miquel, Un conte des “Mille et une nuits,” 7. 39. For an excellent discussion of the ideological difference between Galland’s and Burton’s translations, see Jennifer Thorn, “The Work of Writing Race: Galland, Burton,

Notes to Pages 55–59

265

and The Arabian Nights,” in Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment, ed. Laura J. Rosenthal and Mita Chowdhury (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002),151–69. For a good elaboration of what slavery in the Nights connotes in eighteenth-century Britain, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Slavery, Blackness and Islam: The Arabian Nights in the Eighteenth Century,” in Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter Kitson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 150–72. 40. For a wonderful essay on the influence of the Nights, see Rebecca Carol Johnson, Richard Maxwell, and Katie Trumpener, “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel,” Modern Language Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2007): 243–79. 41. Mia Gerhardt suggests that the witnessing system in the narrative is similar to that which anchors the hadith oral tradition of the prophet Muhammad’s sayings. Therefore, the largely secular juxtaposition of realism and romance in the cycle can nonetheless contain elements that remind listeners of religious morality. This antecedent foreshadows the evolution of the oriental tale into the Christian moral tale in England. See Mia I. Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the “Thousand and One Nights” (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963). 42. Ferial Jabouri Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics: “The Arabian Nights” in Comparative Context (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996), 3, 15, 29–36. 43. Tzvetan Todorov, “Narrative Men,” in The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 66–79. 44. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center, 1958). 45. Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 46. Todorov’s full-fledged narratological analysis of the action-oriented adventure tales such as the Sindbad cycle (which was in fact the fi rst free-standing cycle of the Persian Hazar afsaneh that Galland encountered) is through symbolic algebra: for instance, relations of an action of consecution can be mapped by a plus sign, +, whereas relations of an action of consequence can be mapped by an arrow, →. Much of this is watered-down Propp, who in turn is following ideas of narratological algebra taken from his mentors such as A. N. Vesselovsky and Victor Shklovsky. 47. Furthermore, “the adventure chronotope is thus characterized by a technical, abstract connection between space and time, by the reversibility of moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space.” Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 100. 48. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, in vol. 3 of The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 51, 57. 49. See, for instance, the suggestively titled biography by Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996), 37–52, 417–21. 50. See, for instance, William C. Spengemann, “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (1984): 384–414. 51. Srinivas Aravamudan, “Petting Oroonoko,” in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 29–70. 52. Felicity Nussbaum discusses very well Behn’s capacity to mobilize both aboli-

266

Notes to Pages 60 –62

tionism and Orientalism through Oroonoko. See Felicity Nussbaum, “Between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Blacks So Called,’ 1688–1788,” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: EighteenthCentury Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 137–66. 53. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 41–42. 54. Behn, Oroonoko, 118. It is worth asking, if somewhat uncharitably, for a fuller discussion of the unstated secrets in the text. If Behn was indeed sent as a spy (a very precocious recruit in her early twenties), were there other political intrigues she was fomenting, which demanded the surveillance of Colonel Martin, the brother to “Harry Martin, the great Oliverian” (97, 111)? This explanation in the novella is ironical, as the parliamentarian Henry Martin was a bitter opponent of Cromwell; subsequently Behn would become a friend and admirer of Colonel Martin, naming him the hero of her play The Younger Brother, or The Amorous Jilt (1696). It is an interesting coincidence that the narrator is “apt to fall into Fits of dangerous Illness upon any extraordinary Melancholy,” just in the manner of the Turkish spy Mahmut (117). Oroonoko and Imoinda go through two moments of narrative subjectification and corresponding desubjectivation through slavery and dismemberment. 55. Ibid., 59. 56. Ibid., 59, 66, 92, 102. 57. Ibid., Oroonoko, 56. 58. For a discussion of Behn’s Cartesianism and interest in Fontenelle, see Todd, Secret Life of Aphra Behn, 396–400; for a very interesting take on Behn’s skepticism with respect to Fontenelle and Cartesianism, see Robert Markley, “Global Analogies: Cosmology, Geosymmetry and Skepticism in Some Works of Aphra Behn,” in Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, ed. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 189–212. 59. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 9; and Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 60. Ros Ballaster sees four dominant fictional subgenres imported from France in this earlier period—the heroic romance, the petite histoire or nouvelle, the chronique scandaleuse, and the love letter. However, the idea that these genres are uniquely feminocentric has become debatable. See Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 42–66. William Warner suggests that the early novel instantiates the inauguration of a media culture of entertainment rather than high art and that the “novels of amorous intrigue” written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood are formula fiction but also sophisticated responses to the antinovelistic discourse of the early period. The later national realism of the mid-eighteenth century is a Whiggish counterresponse (continued in a Marxist strain by Ian Watt and others) that enshrines secondary English characteristics as primary realist features. Warner argues for a resituating of the novel in terms of the genre’s perpetually defensive self-defi nition against puritanical antinovelism, and this embattled position partly explains Richardson’s and Fielding’s self-promotion even as they both disavow and recycle their female predecessors. The focus on justification, nationalism, and realism

Notes to Pages 62–66

267

makes for a navel-gazing institutional history of the solely English origins of the novel that is implausible. See William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1–44. 61. See Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Literary Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 62. While Defoe’s authorship of this text has not been established beyond doubt, I have followed Geoffrey Sill’s suggestion that there is a demonstrable though not ironclad link between A Continuation of the Letters Written by a Turkish Spy and Robinson Crusoe. See Geoffrey Sill, “The Source of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘Sudden Joys,’ “ Notes and Queries 45, no. 1 (1998): 67–68. Of course I also follow the lead of Defoe’s principal modern biographers, Paula R. Backscheider and Maximillian E. Novak, both of whom identify the text as Defoe’s. 63. [Daniel Defoe], A Continuation of the Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (London, 1718), v. 64. Ibid., 270. 65. Ibid., 270–71; see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 66. See Partha Chaterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [orig. 1986]), 36–39. 67. Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 529. 68. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 38; cited in Novak, Daniel Defoe, 234. 69. Novak, Daniel Defoe, 536. 70. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunate Mistress, or A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Call’d the Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany; Being the Person Known By the Name of the Lady Roxana, In the Time of King Charles II (London: T. Warner, 1724). Page numbers in parentheses refer to Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. Jane Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 71. See David Blewett, Defoe’s Art of Fiction: “Robinson Crusoe,” “Moll Flanders,” “Colonel Jack,” and “Roxana” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 121–27, and his introduction to Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982), 13–14. 72. Connoting espionage, Roxana uses the term “intelligence” four times (70, 90, 316, 321) and “information” three times (93, 134, 217). 73. William Warner suggests that the novel continues the serialization of fiction begun by the female novelists discussed; he divides the novel into five discrete episodes. See Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 153. This aspect also matches the epistolary structure of The Turkish Spy. 74. See Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 164. 75. See Roxana, ed. Blewett, 395n191.

268

Notes to Pages 66–71

76. One reading suggests that Roxana’s later relationship with an older nobleman is on the basis of granting him anal intercourse, which was often seen in Britain as an Italian or Turkish predilection. See Roxana, 228; Maximillian E. Novak, “The Unmentionable and Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15 (1982): 85–102; and Novak, Daniel Defoe, 622 and 622n54. 77. For the influence of Mary Carleton’s biography on Defoe’s fictions, see Mary Jo Kietzman, “Defoe Masters the Serial Subject,” English Literary History 66 (1999): 677–705. 78. I thank Robert Markley for making this suggestion. 79. See Mayo, The Novel and the Magazines, 58–59, 248, 303, 366; see also Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherezade in England, A Study of Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism of “The Arabian Nights” (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1978), 11. 80. Ali, Scheherezade, 141. 81. According to André Miquel, there are at least six fictional genres present in the Arabic original, of which three are major and three minor. The three major genres are (a) miraculous stories, (b) epic, and (c) individualized novel-romance. The three minor genres are (d) humorous trickster tales, (e) historical anecdotes, and (f) salutary moral fables. To some degree Todorov’s proposition concerns action-orientation in the Sindbad tales, which belong to (c), but action-orientation is, of course, present in all of these genres, though not in equal degree. See Miquel, preface to Les mille et une nuits, xxxvi–xxxvii. 82. Georges May, “Les mille et une nuits” d’Antoine Galland, ou le chef d’œuvre invisible (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986), 8. It is perhaps disappointing that Peter Caracciolo, a scholar of the reception history of the Nights, feels obliged to demur that “apart from Rasselas, nothing of any great literary profundity was achieved in the pseudo-oriental genre until the publication of Vathek.” Caracciolo’s defensiveness is understandable given the furious attacks, both past and present, that have been mounted on the eighteenth-century oriental tale, especially once the emphasis moved from all novels to just those kinds seen as unredeemable. See Peter L. Caracciolo, “Introduction: Such a Storehouse of Ingenious Fiction and Splendid Imagery,” in The “Arabian Nights” in English Literature, ed. Peter L. Caracciolo (London: Macmillan, 1988), 4. 83. James Beattie, “On Fable and Romance,” in Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), 508. 84. Ibid., 509–10. In contrast, Ali argues that Beattie’s response is partly appreciative, at least in relation to dismissals of the genre by earlier commentators such as Lord Kames, Frances Atterbury, or Henry James Pye (Ali, Scheherezade in England, 18–19). 85. John Hawkesworth, “Of the different kinds of narrative and why they are universally read,” Adventurer, November 18, 1752, 17–21. 86. Ibid., 26. 87. Critic J. Paul Hunter has argued that Watt’s history of the novel, even though now taken for a Marxist historicism, was in its moment a theoretical antihistoricism that deliberately ignored and simplified a range of precursors. See Hunter, “Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe (with an Excursus on the Farther Adventures of Ian Watt

Notes to Pages 71–77

269

and Two Notes on the Present State of Literary Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, nos. 2–3 (2000): 227–37. 88. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (Colchester, UK: W. Keymer, 1785), 1:8, 14. 89. Ibid., 2:58. 90. Ibid., 2:59. 91. See Ros Ballaster, “Playing the Second String: The Role of Dinarzade in The Arabian Nights,” in The “Arabian Nights” in Historical Context, 84n2. 92. Reeve’s Charoba originates in a tale by Murtada ibn al-Afi f that was rendered into French by Pierre Vattier in 1672, whereupon it was translated into English by John Davies as The Egyptian History, treating of the Pyramids, the inundation of the Nile and other prodigies. Walter Savage Landor took this story up for further application in Gebir (1798). 93. Gerhardt, Art of Storytelling, 236. 94. See Kamuf, cited in n11. 95. Reeve, Progress of Romance, 1:25. 96. William Warner sees Reeve, John Dunlop, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Walter Scott as “orientalizing” these early novels, but one could just as well say that his approach “mediatizes” them, or that Watt’s earlier approach appropriates them for “individualism.” I am sympathetic to Warner’s “uniformitarian” thesis that everything always already exists in some form, but he overcorrects for the inevitable “novelty of the novel” hypotheses. See Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 18–19. 97. Richard Hole, Remarks on the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments”; in Which The “Origin of Sinbad’s Voyages,” and “Other Oriental Fictions,” Is Particularly Considered (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797), 2–3. 98. Ibid., 8. 99. Ibid., 12–14. 100. Ibid., 248. 101. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragment #116,” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 78.

CH A PTER 2 1. Alain Grosrichard, Structure du sérail: la fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l’Occident classique (Paris: Seuil, 1979); English translation, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1998). 2. See epigraph on previous page, translation mine. Montesquieu, “Quelques réflexions sur Les lettres persanes” (1754). 3. In the vast secondary bibliography on Montesquieu, speculation about the “secret chain” could be said to constitute a chapter of its own. To give only a few examples, see Pauline Kra, “The Invisible Chain of the Lettres persanes,” Studies on Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century 23 (1963): 7–60; Theodore Braun, “La chaîne secrète: A Decade of Interpretations,” French Studies 42 (1988): 278–91; Randolph Paul Runyon, The Art of

270

Notes to Pages 77–84

the “Persian Letters”: Unlocking Montesquieu’s Secret Chain (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 4. For instance, consider Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, viscomte de Guillerargues, Lettres portugaises (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1669). 5. See Perry Anderson, “Persian Letters (Montesquieu, 1721),” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 161–72. 6. “La condition du savoir réussi est donc la non appartenance à la société décrite; autrement dit, on ne peut pas à la fois vivre dans une société, au sens fort, et la connaître” (Successful ethnographic knowledge depends on not belonging to the culture under analysis; in other words, you cannot belong to a culture and know it at the same time). Tzvetan Todorov, “Réflexions sur les Lettres persanes,” Romanic Review 74, no. 3 (1983): 306. 7. Franco Moretti tracks forty-four novelistic subgenres from 1740 to 1915 and claims that two-thirds of them have fairly short shelf lives of between twenty-three and thirty-five years. See Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 20–24. 8. This is a rough way of putting it, as the harem fiction is still interspersed throughout the middle segments of the text. 9. A cogent discussion of this problem can be found in Aram Vartanian, “Eroticism and Politics in the Lettres persanes,” Romanic Review 60, no. 1 (1969): 23–33. 10. Dena Goodman, Criticism in Action: Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 44. 11. Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 46. 12. Montesquieu asserts flat out in De l’esprit des lois that justice or fairness precedes law, with the example of the radii and the circle. However, Lettres persanes renders ironic many such assertions by the reversal of philosophical propositions that can happen only through fiction. For this reason I can assert that Lettres persanes is a text of Enlightenment Orientalism that powerfully critiques itself, whereas Montesquieu’s later political treatise is much more flat-footed, and in several respects closer to Said’s account of Orientalism. 13. While Dena Goodman suggests that the comparative critical Enlightenment inaugurated by the text begins with the contrast between sincerity and despotism laid out in L.8, we could also say that the failure of such a structure is already proleptically suggested by L.3, where the husband who decided the contest has decamped, leaving the field in chaos. 14. For a good reading of the internal incoherence of Usbek’s discourse, see G. J. Mallinson, “Usbek, Language and Power: Images of Authority in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes,” French Forum 18, no. 1 (1993): 23–36. 15. If it appears as if the harem inevitably unleashes a war of the sexes because of gender segregation and the abuse of the despot’s authority by his surrogates, it is also the case that the French court has been contaminated by empowering various women as intermediaries who take on the function of the eunuchs in the Persian harem. Rica describes the women at the French court as a state within a state, a veritable republic as well as a secret society in the exercise of power (L.107).

Notes to Pages 86–93

271

16. Roxane exults in having played Usbek’s jealous surveillance to her advantage (“je me suis jouée de ta jalousie,” L.169]. This phrase puns on using the very mechanisms of surveillance as an escape route, suggesting that Roxane was delighted by Usbek’s jealousy but also that she could conduct her sexual play through the harem windows, known as jalousies (Aphéridon’s clandestine tryst with his married sister Astarté, despite the jealousy of her husband, is also through a jalousie in the interpolated tale discussed below). For a brilliant discussion of the function of the jalousie in Lettres persanes, put in relation to Louis XIV’s encouragement of jealousy at the court, and also the haremlike windows called persiennes, see Goodman, Criticism in Action, 35–43. Montesquieu had expressed interest in writing a book on the history of jealousy, including the role windows play in spying on the target. 17. Goodman suggests that Anaïs commits suicide, which is not accurate. Her candid speech provokes Ibrahim when she suggests that she prefers death to his presence, but it was not certain that the enraged husband would stab her to death. 18. For a discussion of the themes of prosperity and libertarianism in the depopulation essays, see David B. Young, “Libertarian Demography: Montesquieu’s Essay on Depopulation in the Lettres persanes,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 4 (1975): 669–82. 19. This tale presumes that sibling marriage, disallowed under Zoroastrianism after Alexander’s conquest of Persia, is still a prevalent custom among Zoroastrians in early modern times. 20. For the same reasons, Judith Shklar suggests that this tale is the most radical story in the fiction. See Shklar, Montesquieu, 37. 21. Rhédi praises republics outright in L.131. Despite Montesquieu’s official favoring of a monarchy, he lavishes considerable praise on republics, and also on England, with its respect of natural liberty and curtailment of monarchy. 22. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 353–99. 23. I will resist the loose and rather confusing translation of droit public as “international law”—which is highly anachronistic, to say the least. This is a moment where Montesquieu is performing a philological investigation into the spirit of the law that hasn’t yet crystallized into international law proper. There has been a long discussion of the Roman origins of droit public as related to sovereignty theory and its justification as the law of nations. It is unclear whether we can still speak of this as the system called international law, which is largely a nineteenth-century construction that bases itself retroactively on the Westphalian moment as its preferred myth of origin. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2006); and Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 24. For a good discussion of these contexts, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideas of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 79–108.

272

Notes to Pages 95–99

25. George Lyttelton, Letters from a Persian in England to His Friend at Isfahan, 5th ed. (London, 1744), 4. 26. The Troglodytes episode was a perennial of Enlightenment political philosophy all the way from Hobbes to Rousseau. For a recounting of the significance of Lyttelton’s Troglodytes, see Samuel C. Chew, “An English Precursor of Rousseau,” Modern Language Notes 32, no. 6 (1917): 321–37. Chew is a bit harsh, assessing Lyttelton’s attempt as “a piece of third-rate journeyman-work [that] has succeeded the work of genius” (324). For a more charitable view of Lyttelton’s work, see Pat Rogers’s introduction to a modern edition, The Persian Letters: Being Letters of a Persian in England to His Friend in Ispahan, by George Lyttelton, ed. Roderick Boyd Porter (Cleveland: Rowbant Club, 1988). 27. Samuel Johnson, vol. 4 of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (London, 1790–91), 478. Lyttelton’s poems have “nothing to be despised and little to be admired” (491). Rogers’s introduction demonstrates Lyttelton’s high reputation even till the end of the century, when his Persian Letters was published in the fi rst volume of the London imprint titled Harrison’s British Classicks in 1785 and the Dublin imprint titled Moore’s British Classicks in 1790. 28. Rogers, introduction, xxii. However, Rogers vastly overstates his case when he judges that Lyttelton “wisely abstains from the excessive fictional intrigue with which Montesquieu complicates his main thematic lines,” xxiv. It is the literary complexity of Montesquieu that has made his Persian Letters a perennial classic, whereas the thesisdriven version by Lyttelton is hardly read today. 29. See Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169–70. 30. William Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 138. 31. Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, in vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 14. Henceforth, pagination to this edition will be parenthetically in the main text. 32. See George Anson, A Voyage Round the World In the Years 1740, 1741, 1742, 1743, 1744 (London, 1748), 510–48. See also Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Around the World (London: HarperCollins, 1999). I thank my friend Bob Markley for the research that shows Anson’s elaborate bluff and denigration of the Chinese. See Robert Markley, “Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange and Ritual in Edward Page’s ‘Secret History,’ “ in The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 215–33. 33. See Wayne C. Booth, “ ‘The Self-Portraiture of Genius’: The Citizen of the World and Critical Method,” Modern Philology, 73, no. 4 (1976): S85–96. 34. These points are summaristic stabs at Booth’s masterful discussion. 35. Anson, Voyage Round the World, 541, 542–44. 36. See James Watt, “Goldsmith’s Cosmopolitanism,” Eighteenth-Century Life 30, no. 1 (2005): 56–75. 37. I disagree with my old graduate student colleague Christopher Brooks, who reads this passage, and the entire work, through a Saidian lens. See Christopher Brooks,

Notes to Pages 100 –106

273

“Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World: Knowledge and the Imposture of ‘Orientalism,’ “ Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 35, no. 1 (1993): 131–32, 124–44. 38. See Horace Walpole, Letter from Xo Ho: A Chinese Philosopher at London to his friend Lien Chi at Peking (London: 1757), and William Beckford, Vathek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [orig. 1786]). 39. As was the tendency in other works by Goldsmith, including “The Traveller” and “A Comparative View of Nations.” See Watt, “Goldsmith’s Cosmopolitanism,” 67. 40. See the powerful argument around chinoiserie as neoculturation in David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 41. Charles Hamilton, An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afgans (London: Kearsley, 1787), xvi. Charles had been in India for five years and had also translated the Hedaya, or code of Islamic law. The texts by brother and sister have some interesting parallels, even while they generically interrogate each other. Charles’s ancillary labors as one of the fi rstgeneration Indian Orientalists sits squarely within the historiographic and linguistic investigative modality. He was given a five-year leave by Hastings to translate the Hedaya but died of tuberculosis before he could return as the British resident to the nawab of Awadh. Elizabeth Hamilton also pays homage to her brother several times within her text, thereby extending his unfulfi lled career. The preliminary dissertation to the text is a nod to brother Charles’s Historical Relation, and characters in the sisterly fictionalization, such as Charles Percy, are idealized portraits of him. 42. “The variety to be seen in the streets, where you behold a concourse of people, whose dress, complexion, religion, and manners, all differ widely from each other: and whose numbers are so nearly equalled, that it is impossible to say, who is the stranger. Here the holy Fakeer, with no other dress than a piece of muslin wrapped round his lean and shrivelled limbs, walks with folded arms, ruminating on some passage of the holy Shaster, and striving, by penance and mortification, to facilitate the moment of absorption and unchanging bliss. There the turbaned Mussulman, from the top of an adjoining minaret, adjures the followers of Mahomet to attend the hours of devotion in the holy Mosque; while the stately Armenian, the money changing Jew, and the no less money-loving Englishman, mingle on the beach; too intent on their affairs of traffic, to listen to any voice save that which calls to the temple of Lacshmi” (167). 43. British women are hardly the idealized beings that Percy had depicted for him in India. They pursue the will-o’-the-wisp of fashion, learning French to get a head start on their clothes rather than for erudition, and are much less versed in the fi ne arts such as painting and music than Percy had boasted. The British are hypocrites when they condemn sati, then, especially as they do nothing to uplift their prostitutes and other destitute women. 44. The Oriental traveler comments by way of the defamiliarization of an alien environment. Hamilton’s goals in terms of the Indian context are to effectuate a “translation,” as suggested by the title of her novel, rather than a fi rst-person account. Elizabeth Hamilton’s preliminary dissertation examines some of the British approach to India in a critical manner. It is acknowledged that it is mercantile avarice that draws

274

Notes to Pages 106–108

Europeans toward India. Yet while colonialism begins with “the thirst of conquest and the desire for gain,” it leads to the transmission of new knowledge and information and enhances literature. The translatio studii follows on the heels of the translatio imperii. Charles Hamilton argues in his Historical Relation that “the stern and harsh features of the Mussulman character insensibly acquired some softer tints from an association with the mild, forbearing, and amiable temper of the Hindoos.” “Brave, active, polished, and industrious,” Hindus, left to themselves, lived under a “mild and simple form of government, founded on a religion whose very essence seems to be benevolence and an abhorrence of blood.” Charles Hamilton, Historical Relation, 19. 45. However, if “woman” in this period is a figure for a much larger cultural dynamic in which class differences are rendered as if they were gender differences, we need to consider how much the fi gure of the “Oriental” as satirical mouthpiece likewise concentrates a range of cultural and national perceptions. 46. In what is clearly the most in-depth study of Elizabeth Hamilton’s authorial impact and social position to date, Gary Kelly argues that she is part of a more general cultural revolution in the British context. Sentimentalism and middle-class professional culture consolidated a new effort to separate from aristocratic dissipations and court society as well as the riotous tendencies of the mob and the working classes. “The figure of woman” is appreciated in Kelly’s argument and made to do the cultural task of constructing a new national culture in response to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Pro-Jacobin women writers of the 1790s such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Hays, as well as anti-Jacobins including Hannah More and Elizabeth Hamilton, equally celebrate a newfound female literary professionalism even as they confer a diminished middle-class status onto the lower orders. See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 126–161. As the character Sophia Goldborne suggests in a contemporary novel by Phebe Gibbes titled Hartly House, Calcutta, she is becoming “orientalised at all points” during her stay in India. Gibbes suggests that the British, both men and women, can presumably be Indianized and rendered sensitive in ways that sublimate their harsher natures. Sophia manages to conduct a platonic affair with a Brahmin, who converts her to Hinduism before he dies, after which she weds a boring Englishman. Just as the late eighteenth-century cult of sensibility was marketed as an aristocracy of the soul practiced by discerning women and effeminate men, Brahmanic Hinduism is being equated with sensibility. See Phebe Gibbes, Hartly House, Calcutta, ed. Michael Franklin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007 [orig. 1789]). 47. Thomas Maurice, Indian Antiquities (London, 1793–1800). 48. Peter Markoe, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, or Letters Written By a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1787), and Lotfi Ben Rejeb, “Observing the Birth of a Nation: The Oriental Spy Genre and Nation Making in Early American Literature,” in The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, Yale Center for International and Area Studies (2002): 253–89. 49. In a similarly hilarious fashion, Sheermaal informs Ma¯a¯nda¯a¯ra that Za¯a¯rmilla was grossly deceived when he was told that all English people belong to one caste: “Instead of being all one Cast, as he imagines, the people are divided into three Casts, all

Notes to Pages 109–117

275

separate, and distinct from each other; and which are commonly known by the several appellations of people of family, people of no family, and people of style, or fashion. The fi rst two are of much more ancient origin than the other Cast; which indeed appears to have sprung from an unnatural mixture of the others; like the tribes of Buhran Sunker in Hindostan” (122–23). 50. Of course, here his mistake is functioning as a rationalization of the meatless diet of the most impoverished in Britain. Likewise, “learned antiquarians” are said to comment on the similarities of sound to establish a shared etymology between the terms laird and rajah—when the two obviously have no linguistic assonance. This joke raps William Jones on the knuckles. The culminating joke in this sequence is Sheermaal’s observation that “like us [Hindus], they [the British] consider themselves a distinct and favoured people, superior to the rest of the inhabitants of the earth.” Parochialism is, paradoxically, the most universally found human attribute. 51. Burke claims that the Parliament ought to disregard the possibility of any character witnesses’ appearing on behalf of Hastings, because “if any Gentoo were to be prevailed upon to come to England he was not to be considered as a person disregarding all OBLIGATIONS OF RELIGION, and consequently not entitled to CREDIT as a WITNESS.” Present as fictional constructs, Burke’s victims are always absent—and have to be in order to have credibility as victims. The presence of any Indians would be an automatic disqualification, because they would be crossing the sea in violation of caste taboo. Edmund Burke, in The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, 1796), 2:56. 52. For an interesting reading that shows how Hamilton’s version of India serves British imperial ideology by portraying Hindus as victims to be rescued from Muslim tyranny, see Mona Narain, “Colonial Desires: The Fantasy of Empire and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 4 (2006): 585–98. 53. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1765), 1:87. 54. Ibid., 1:82–83, 88. 55. See Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

CH A PTER 3 1. For some useful background to this topic, see Grant McColley, “The SeventeenthCentury Doctrine of a Plurality of Worlds,” Annals of Science 1, no. 4 (1936): 385–430; and Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 2. Cavendish’s Blazing World is extraplanetary but not identifi ably lunar, and Fatouville’s and Behn’s works were plays that popularized lunar voyages. 3. For the seventeenth-century background, see Leonard M. Marsak, “The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 49, no. 7 (1959): 1–64; Leonard M. Marsak, “Bernard de Fontenelle: In Defense

276

Notes to Pages 119–120

of Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959): 111–22; and Patricia Fara, “Heavenly Bodies: Newtonianism, Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds Debate in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 35 (2004): 143–60. 4. Bernard le Bouyer Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, ed. Christophe Martin (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 51–52. Subsequent parenthetical page citations in the main text will be to this edition. 5. See table 2 in Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 136–38. There were thirty-three separate French editions in Fontenelle’s lifetime—i.e., all the way through till 1757. There were also six different English translations in the eighteenth century with multiple reprints: Knight, Behn, Glanville, Gardiner, “a gentleman of the inner temple,” and Gunning (Plunkett). 6. See Jean Dagen, “Fontenelle et l’épicurisme,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 103 (2003): 397–414; and Jean Dagen, “Refléxions sur les mondes de Fontenelle,” Littérature classique 22 (1994): 127–44. 7. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 103. 8. See Steven F. Rendall, “Fontenelle and His Public,” MLN 86, no. 4 (1971): 496– 508; Alain Niderst, “Vulgarisation scientifique et libertinage dans Les entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes,” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 14, no. 27 (1987): 485–93; and Christophe Martin, “Présentation,” in Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 23–25. For a broader discussion of the salon context of Cartesian and Copernican science in France and its difference from English science, see Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 9. Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Nagel, 1955), 3:226–27; cited in Louis Desgraves, “Montesquieu et Fontenelle,” in Fontenelle: Actes du Colloque Tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 Octobre 1987, ed. Alain Niderst (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989), 308. 10. These annual reports started in 1699 and continued till 1740. Furthermore, Fontenelle authored Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences, which covered the period from 1666 to 1686. He lived till 1757, dying about a month shy of his hundredth birthday. In fulfi lling this role, Fontenelle could be seen as a forerunner of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists such as Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert. It was D’Alembert who took on the position as perpetual secretary of the Académie when Fontenelle retired. 11. This conversational model was so successful that Francesco Algarotti used a male philosopher and ladies for interlocutors in his immensely popular Il newtonianismo per le dame (1737), a tract that explained Newtonian optics to the ladies and that was dedicated to Fontenelle for having invented this genre. 12. Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742) took this insight in a poetic direction some decades later. See above 21–22. 13. Fontenelle was greatly interested in pastoral in general, writing a Discours sur la nature de l’églogue published along with his own attempts at eclogue, Poésies pastorales de M. D. F. (Paris: Guerout, 1688). For an interesting discussion of the Orientalist development of the eclogue following Fontenelle, see Harold Elmer Mantz, “Nondramatic Pastoral in Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” PMLA 31, no. 3 (1916): 421–47.

Notes to Pages 122–128

277

14. See François Bernier, “Lettre à M. Chapelain du 4 octobre 1667 touchant les superstitions des Indous,” in vol. 1 of Suite des mémoires, (Paris, 1671), cited in Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 88. 15. See Gregory Matthew Adkins, “When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 3 (2000): 433–52. 16. See my extensive discussion of Huet in chapter 1, 36–40. 17. Christiaan Huygens also reasons from similitudes in suggesting that just as animals in America are not vastly different in their internal structure from those on other continents, animals on other planets would resemble those on earth. See Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros: or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets (London, 1698), 21. 18. Here Huygens reasons in the opposite direction, suggesting that the heat on Mercury would make the inhabitants neither wise nor industrious as compared to inhabitants of colder climes on earth. Mercurians would be like Brazilians and Africans, rather than hyperactive as Fontenelle’s philosopher suggests. See ibid., 82. 19. A long interpolation added to the 1742 edition by Fontenelle compares the political structure of bees with that of “Arabs who live only on pillage” (116–18). 20. See Michel Delon, “La marquise et le philosophe,” Revue des sciences humaines 54, no. 182 (1981): 65–78. 21. See Robin Howells, “The Principle of Mobility in Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes,” French Studies 46, no. 2 (1992): 129–43. 22. Fontenelle had also published an extremely successful Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683), skillfully revivifying a subgenre of its own that goes back all the way to Plato and Lucian. See John W. Cosentini, Fontenelle’s Art of Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 23. A Discovery of New Worlds From the French Made English By Mrs A. Behn (London, 1688). Behn’s translator’s introduction is unpaginated. 24. See Lisa J. Schnell, “Parenthetical Disturbances: Aphra Behn and the Rhetoric of Relativity,” Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 12, no. 1–2 (1992): 95–113; and Mirella Agorni, “ ‘The Voice of the Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter,” Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 181–95. 25. See Andreas Tacquet, Opera Mathematica (Antwerp, Belgium: Jacobus Meursius, 1669). 26. For an account of Behn’s conservative stance as a translator, see Sarah Goodfellow, “ ‘Such Masculine Strokes’: Aphra Behn as Translator of A Discovery of New Worlds,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal concerned with British Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): 229–50. As Robert Markley argues, Behn is also skillfully Newtonianizing Fontenelle’s Cartesianism. See Robert Markley, “Global Analogies: Cosmology, Geosymmetry and Skepticism in Some Works of Aphra Behn,” in Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, ed. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 189–212. 27. There have been attempts to characterize Fontenelle as the fi rst Enlightenment feminist, but there is also evidence that he appropriated women’s writing as his own. See Robert Niklaus, “Fontenelle as a Model for the Transmission and Vulgarization of Ideas in the Enlightenment,” in Voltaire and His World: Studies Presented to W. H.

278

Notes to Pages 129–130

Barber, ed. A. Mason et al. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985), 167–83, 168; and Nina Ekstein, “Appropriation and Gender: The Case of Catherine Bernard and Bernard De Fontenelle,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 59–80. 28. George Boas, The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), 1, emphasis in original. 29. See Somadeva Bhatta, The Ocean of Story: being C.H. Tawney’s translation of Somadeva’s “Katha¯ sarit sa¯gara; or, Ocean of streams of story,” trans. C. H. Tawney, ed. N. M. Penzer (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968). The Pahlavi version of this text had organized the discovery of the tales as a quest narrative, whereby King Anoushirvan had heard some of the tales and, being intrigued, sent his principal physician, Burzoë, to seek the book in its entirety in India. The doctor brought back the book as a form of moral medicine. Putting a further twist on this action was an ironic frame that demonstrates the dangers of giving counsel. Burzoë, the fi gure who in later versions turns into a counselor called Bidpai (perhaps a corruption of Sanskrit for vidya¯pati, or teacher), was thrown into a dungeon by the king Dabschelim for honest advice he gave concerning how to improve his statecraft. Bidpai is later redeemed to narrate the dangers a prince faces by having placed trust in the wrong advisers. The medium of beast fable helps deflect the sensitive nature of such courtly advice. 30. See M. R. Kale, ed., The Hitopades´a of Na¯ra¯yan.a (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1967). 31. See Joseph Jacobs, The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai (London: David Nutt, 1888), xii, xxv–xxvi. See also Donald Beecher, John Butler, and Carmine Di Biase, introduction to Sir Thomas North, Moral Philosophy of Doni, Popularly Known as “The Fables of Bidpai,” ed. Beecher, Butler, and Di Biase (Ottowa, Canada: Dovehouse, 2003), 11. The Arabic translator al-Moqaffa had initially been a Zoroastrian but had subsequently converted to Islam, and was later accused of Manichaeanism and assassinated by order of the caliph al-Mansur. The tales possibly generated danger by association for al-Moqaffa. 32. See C. van Ruymbeke, postscript to Ramsay Wood, Kalila and Dimna: Fables of Friendship and Betrayal (London: Saqi Books, 2008), 300. Ruymbeke asserts that the collection now exists in more than fi fty languages. 33. Beecher, Butler, and Di Biase, introduction, 13. For other introductions to the Kalila and Dimna cycle, see also Friedrich Max Müller, “On the Migration of Fables,” in Chips from A German Workshop (New York: Scribner, 1900) , 4:145–97. 34. At the same time, as Michel de Certeau has asserted, fable “originally referred to the stories whose task it was to symbolize a society.” See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 12. Galland, the fi rst European translator of the Nights, was also working on a translation of Bidpai that he put aside in 1696; this was later completed by his collaborator Denis Cardonne, and then reworked by ThomasSimon Gueullette and published posthumously in 1724. However, in the case of Bidpai, there were many precursors in several European languages dating back more than four hundred years. David Sahid’s 1698 rendition into French was also very popular. 35. Jean de la Fontaine, Fables (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 175–76.

Notes to Pages 130 –139

279

36. Ibid., 179. Translation mine. 37. Ibid., 186. Translation mine. 38. North, Moral Philosophy of Doni, 207. 39. Beecher, Butler, and Di Biase, introduction, 58. 40. See [Joseph Harris], The Instructive and Entertaining Fables of Pilpay, An Ancient Indian Philosopher: Containing a Number of Excellent Rules for the Conduct of Persons of all Ages, and in all Stations; Under several Heads (London, 1747), vii, ii. 41. Ibid., vii. 42. The Sendebar tradition also uses a misogynistic frame involving false accusations of rape by a stepmother against a prince, which lead to the recounting of the unsatisfied sexual desires of women who accordingly cuckolded their husbands in search of lovers. 43. See Beecher, Butler, and Di Biase, introduction, 54. 44. All the same, books such as Mark Loveridge’s, despite its learnedness, seem mostly oblivious to the massive importation of Eastern fable into English literary culture, focusing largely on the Greek antecedents where fable is said to have begun, even though the Aesop-Locman confusion and the Arab intermediation make these Greek origins highly mediated at the very least. Loveridge’s sentence, “Indian fable is widely known and appreciated in the European Renaissance for its idiosyncrasies and exoticism,” could be the subject of an entire book in its own right, and especially going forward in the eighteenth century. See Mark Loveridge, A History of Augustan Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62. 45. See C. van Ruymbeke, postscript to Moral Philosophy of Doni, 301. 46. Alexander Pope, The Guardian, May 21, 1713, 256–61; cited in Hasan Javadi, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1983), 26, 27. 47. Pope, The Guardian, 256. 48. Ibid., 257. 49. Ibid., 258. 50. Ibid., 258. 51. Ibid., 259. 52. Ibid., 261. 53. Ibid., 261. 54. Mark O. Grenby, “Orientalism and Propaganda: The Oriental Tale and Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 215–37. 55. Loveridge also makes this point and is very persuasive about Gay’s being the last great English fabulist with the second collection of 1727 Fables, including an excellent reading of the very interesting Orientalist fable “The Elephant and the Bookseller,” which reflects on the doubling and metafictional aspects of fable. See Loveridge, Augustan Fable, 3, 242–45. 56. Jayne Lewis discusses very well “the ant and the grasshopper” fable in Pamela and the man and the cat (changed into the tiger and the lady) in Clarissa. Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29–31. 57. Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815: With a Cata-

280

Notes to Pages 139–142

logue of 1375 Magazine Novels and Novelettes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962). 58.

Is not the earth

With various living creatures, and the air Replenished, and all these at thy command To come and play before thee? Knowest thou not Their language and their ways? They also know And reason not contemptibly: with these Find pastime. 59. R[obert] Dodsley, preface to Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists. In three books (London, 1761), vi. 60. Dodsley, “Essay on Fable,” in Select Fables of Esop, lviii. 61. See Suvir Kaul, “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal,” PMLA 105 (1990): 220–32. 62. Loveridge’s reading of Augustan fable is useful on suggesting how, through some of these well-known examples, there occurs what he calls the diasporic dissemination of verse fable into the incipient eighteenth-century novel. 63. Harold Williams, The Text of “Gulliver’s Travels” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). 64. See Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 103–13. 65. See [Robert Boyle], “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small, Imparted Likewise by Mr. Boyle,” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–66): 186– 89. For the exposition of the transition from empiricism to skepticism, see McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 100–13. For a discussion of this passage, see also Cristina Malcolmson, “Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society,” in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, ed. Frank Palmeri (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 51. 66. For a classic elaboration of the various cartographic confusions that obtain throughout Gulliver’s Travels, see John Robert Moore, “The Geography of Gulliver’s Travels,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 40 (1941): 214–28. For an account of Swift’s indebtedness to the history of colonialism, see Clement Hawes, “Three Times round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse,” Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 187–214. For two excellent discussions of Swift’s refashioning of discovery literature, see Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 164–215; and Anna Neill, British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 83–119. 67. On theriophily generally, see Boas, Happy Beast. 68. See David E. Hoegberg, “Caesar’s Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7, no. 3 (1995): 239–58. 69. For a wonderful juxtaposition of the relationship between New World voyages to America and Old World voyages to the Far East, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Notes to Pages 142–144

281

70. Campbell sees these correspondence instructions “producing, via the new method, the same old marvel material.” See ibid., 158n36. 71. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “East Indies and West Indies: Comparative Misapprehensions,” Anthropological Forum 16, no. 3 (2006): 291–309. 72. See Michèle Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In Racine’s second preface to Bajazet, he writes: “Que les personnages turcs, quelques modernes qu’il soient, ont de la dignité sur notre théâtre. On les regarde de bonne heure comme anciens. Ce sont des mœurs et des coutumes toutes différentes. Nous avons si peu de commerce avex les princes et les autres personnes qui vivent dans le serial, que nous les considérons, pour ainsi dire, comme des gens qui vivent dans un autre siècle que le nôtre.” See Jean Racine, “Seconde Préface de Bajazet,” in Théâtre complet, ed. Jacques Morel and Alain Viala (Paris: Garnier, 1980), 381–83. 73. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, “Introduction: Approaching Enlightenment Exoticism,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 8. 74. See Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57),” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 463–82. 75. “The voyages of Sindbad claim attention: they were certainly attended to by the author of Gulliver’s Travels.” James Beattie, “On Fable and Romance,” in Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), 10. H. A. R. Gibb also claims that Swift would never have written Gulliver’s Travels without having read The Arabian Nights. See H. A. R. Gibb, The Legacy of Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 201. 76. Laura Brown contextualizes Yahoos in relation to eighteenth-century treatises on the hominoid ape and the orangutang. See Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 46–53. 77. See Dale B. Billingsley, “Gulliver, Mandeville, and Capital Crime,” Notes and Queries 30, no. 1 (1983): 32–33; and H. J. Real and H. J. Vienken, “Gulliver and Mandeville,” Notes and Queries 30, no. 6 (1983): 512. There have also been amusing and anachronistic misrecognitions and concatenations, including the Mardrus translation’s conflation of the Hassan al-Basri story in The Arabian Nights with the sexual shenanigans between Gulliver and the maids of honor and the female Yahoo who makes amorous advances. For an exposition of the anachronistic import of Swift into translations of The Arabian Nights, see Sheila Shaw, “The Rape of Gulliver: Case Study of a Source,” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975): 62–68. For the influence of Gulliver’s Travels on the Chinese novel, see An-chi Wang, “Gulliver’s Travels” and Ching-hua yuan Revisited: A Menippean Approach (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). 78. For the concept of counter-allegory in relation to Swift’s allusiveness at a time of the decline of allegory as a mode, see F. P. Lock, The Politics of “Gulliver’s Travels” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). 79. See Basil Guy, “Ad majorem Societatis gloriam: Jesuit Perspectives on Chinese Mores in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. Rousseau and Porter, 66–85.

282

Notes to Pages 144–148

80. See William Temple, Of Heroic Virtue (London, 1678); and Gerald J. Pierre, “Gulliver’s Voyage to China and Moor Park: The Influence of Sir William Temple upon Gulliver’s Travels,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17, no. 2 (1975): 427–37; and Frank T. Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 52–77. 81. See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 260. 82. See James E. Gill, “Beast over Man: Theriophilic Paradox in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,’ “ Studies in Philology 67, no. 4 (1970): 532–49. For a more recent discussion of theriophily during the Renaissance, see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 83. See Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 124. 84. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 89. 85. See Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). A list of works on the Catholic Index has been compiled by Jesús Martínez de Bujanda in his Index librorum prohibitorum (1600– 1966) (Montreal: Mediaspaul, 2002). 86. For my argument concerning pethood, see Srinivas Aravamudan, “Petting Oroonoko,” in Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 29–70; and for a recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels that uses similar frameworks of analysis, see Anne Cline Kelly, “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Keeper: Talking Animals in Book IV,” English Literary History 74 (2007): 323–49. 87. See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Anne Cline Kelly also claims there is biographical evidence that Swift talked a great deal to his own horses. See Kelly, “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Keeper,” 343–45. Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1967), 156–57. 88. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 89. See R. Howard Bloch, “The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2004): 69–83. For an excellent article that discusses the manner in which Kalila wa dimna connects with translatio studii and translatio imperii in both France and Mongol Persia, see Sharon Kinoshita, “Translatio/n, Empire, and the Worlding of Medieval Literature: The Travels of Kalila wa dimna,” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 371–85. 90. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 11:224. 91. Ibid., 243–44. 92. Ibid., 235. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 248–50. 95. Ibid., 239. 96. Ibid., 242.

Notes to Pages 149–153

283

97. For a very informative study on the importance of horses in eighteenth-century Britain and Swift’s relationship to them, see Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 123–32, 139–46. 98. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 275. 99. Ibid., 293. 100. René Pomeau, “Note sur Zadig,” in Voltaire, Romans et contes, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966), 26. 101. For a useful discussion of the impact of the discussion of Wolff’s ideas at Cirey on the likely composition date (1736–37) and the actual 1751 publication date of this tale, see Peter Lester Smith, “New Light on the Publication of Micromégas,” Modern Philology 73, no. 1 (1975): 77–80. As most of the topical references in Micromégas refer to the late 1730s, it may have existed as the tale called Voyage du baron de Gangan, presented by Voltaire to Frederick the Great in 1739 but since lost. 102. Voltaire, Micromégas, histoire philosophique, in Romans et contes, ed. Pomeau, 134. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers in the text refer to this edition. While all translations are my own, I have checked them against an eighteenth-century English version, Micromegas: A Comic Romance. Being a Severe Satire upon the Philosophy, Ignorance, and Self-Conceit of Mankind. Together with A Detail of the Crusades: And a new Plan for the History of the Human Mind (London: Printed for D. Wilson and T. Durham, 1753). 103. It appears that there was an attempt by friends of Fontenelle to suppress the publication of the tale in 1750, but publication was only delayed rather than stopped altogether. 104. The joke is on Maupertuis’s 1736–37 expedition to Lapland, where he had taken a team to determine whether the earth was flattened at the poles as Newton had suggested. 105. If diminutiveness is literalized as insignificance almost throughout the satire—”the infi nitely little [humans] have a pride that is infi nitely big”—it can also be turned on its head, as when Micromégas utters a paean to the generosity of God’s “gift of intelligence to things that appear so despicable” (147, 143). The smallness of the earth’s inhabitants indicates how puny their endeavors are in the grand scheme of things. Zadig will express similar thoughts when he flees Babylon and guides himself with the help of the stars: “The constellation of Orion and the brilliant star of Sirius guided him toward the pole of Canopus. He was awestruck by these vast orbs of light that appeared as faint sparks to our eyes, whereas the earth appeared to our greedy view as something large and ennobled. He reasoned that men were such as they actually were in reality, insects devouring each other on a small speck of dust” (51). Similar thoughts of perspectival relativism leading to moral nihilism will afflict the multiple representatives of Enlightenment Orientalism, from Rasselas to Vathek, as I have argued elsewhere. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “The Despotic Eye and the Oriental Sublime,” in Tropicopolitans, 190–229. 106. This translation is my own, but I have checked it against the eighteenth-

284

Notes to Pages 153–161

century English edition, The white bull, an oriental history. From an ancient Syrian manuscript, communicated by Mr. Voltaire. Cum notis editoris et variorum . . . The whole faithfully done into English (London: Printed for J. Bew, 1774). 107. See Roger Pearson, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s ‘Contes Philosophiques’ “ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 62, 69. For another useful general discussion see Jacques van den Heuvel, Voltaire dans ses contes: De “Micromégas” à “L’ingénu” (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1967). 108. See Ira O. Wade, Voltaire’s “Micromégas”: A Study in the Fusion of Science, Myth, and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 101. 109. I’ve chosen to translate the phrase with this more pedantic connotation— rather than “Ah! I thought as much!” That official translation leaves Fontenelle sounding more laconic and puts him in a much better light than I suspect Voltaire intended. It does not make sense for Voltaire to end this tale with a pat on the back to Fontenelle; rather, it is meant to be a fi nal nail in the coffin regarding human vanity and bureaucratic complacency. 110. See H. Linn Edsall, “The Idea of History and Progress in Fontenelle and Voltaire,” in Studies by Members of the French Department of Yale University, ed. Albert Feuillerat (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 163–84. For an utterly brilliant analysis, see Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s “Religious Ceremonies of the World” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 111. Translation mine, checked against the eighteenth- century English edition, Babouc; or the world as it goes. By Monsieur de Voltaire. To which are added, letters concerning his disgrace at the Prussian Court: With his letter to his Niece on that Occasion. Also, The force of friendship, or, innocence distress’d. A novel (London: Printed for W. Owen, 1754). 112. Translation mine.

CH A PTER 4 1. David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2. See my argument in Srinivas Aravamudan, “Hobbes and America,” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 60–61. 3. For a very interesting discussion of Picart’s publication in relation to other texts of the 1720s that are relevant, including the Traité des trois imposteurs, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, Lafitau’s study of Native Americans, and Fontenelle’s De l’origine des fables, see Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Comparison: Religions in the Eighteenth Century,” in Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, ed. Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 331–47. Picart was additionally interested in artistic imposture. After his death, Picart’s widow published an influential series of his engravings that simulated classical postures, Impostures innocentes (1734). 4. A groundbreaking study of Picart asserts that Bernard’s text and Picart’s images

Notes to Pages 161–167

285

created modern “religion.” Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2010). 5. Revel, “Uses of Comparison,” 332. 6. See Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 7. Claude Crébillon, L’Écumoire, ou Tanzaï et Néadarné, in vol. 1 of Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Sgard (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2000); and The Skimmer, or The History of Tanzaï and Néadarné (London, 1735). 8. Saugrenutio appears to be a latinization of the French word saugrenu, meaning “absurd” or “crazy.” 9. In this irreverent religious framework, facetious names are assigned to the various translators, such as Jean-Gaspard Crocovius-Putridus and his nephews Balthasar Onérosus and Melchior Insipidus. This fiction is in a long line of Enlightenment diatribes against the irrationality of religion, with rites of worship portrayed as malevolent vehicles for Machiavellian clerics. Religion dominates a gullible public and exercises influence over the political process by ramming theological doctrines down subjects’ throats. The hilarious tale concludes with the capitulation of the high priest. As a phallic prosthesis attached to the sovereign power that has to be swallowed or licked into submission when it happens to rear its ugly head, religion is subject to sexual burlesque and thereby given a much-deserved comeuppance. The sexual chaos caused by religious opportunists is ultimately set right through the establishment of a generalized political morality. 10. This critique of Orientalism as superficial within a class-based empire is made notably by David Cannadine in his Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11. For Prévost’s contributions to “singularity” within journalism with respect to his miscellany-oriented newspaper, Le Pour et Contre, see Jean Sgard, “Un genre singulier,” in Prévost et le récit bref, ed. Jan Hermans and Paul Pelckmans (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 11–21. 12. See Martin Calder, “Fantasy and Infantilization: The Abbé Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne,” in Encounters with the Other: A Journey to the Limits of Language through Works by Rousseau, Defoe, Prévost and Graffigny (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 192. 13. Prévost could also have had in mind the intriguing case of Comte C. A. de Bonneval, who took refuge in Constantinople in 1729 and eventually converted to Islam. Prévost, himself an exile who styled himself as Prévost d’Exil, defended Bonneval publicly in 1729. References to the novel will be parenthetical to the French edition and the English translation. See Abbé Prévost, Histoire d’une Grecque moderne, ed. Alan J. Singerman (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); and History of a Modern Greek Woman, trans. Lydia Davis, in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury France, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 543–717. 14. See Christelle Brun, “L’Abbé Prévost: De la sensibilité à la spiritualité,” Travaux de Littérature 21 (2008): 211, 205–21. 15. See Catherine Cusset, “La loi de l’intérêt ou la naissance du sujet moderne dans

286

Notes to Pages 167–175

Histoire d’une Grecque moderne de l’Abbé Prévost,” in Le travail des Lumières. Pour Georges Benrekessa, ed. Caroline Jacot Grapa et al. (Paris: Champion, 2002), 189–99. 16. See Florence Magnot-Ogilvy, “Paroles à vendre: Circulation d’argent et circulation de récits dans le roman-mémoires à la fi n des années 1730,” in Art et argent en France au temps des Premiers Modernes (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), ed. Martial Poirson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004), 173–84. 17. Jean Sgard discusses in detail the text’s focus “by allusion or preterition through emotional atmosphere” and its transformation of “historic time into dramatic time” (“Genre singulier,” 10). 18. See Jonathan Walsh, Abbé Prévost’s “Histoire d’une Grecque moderne”: Figures of Authority on Trial (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2001). See also Jonathan Walsh, “Real and Symbolic Exchange in Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne,” French Review 74, no. 1 (2000): 94–105. Joan de Jean makes a persuasive case for Prévost’s novel being a throwback to seventeenth-century novels of préciosité in which women dictate to men through the added advantage of their impregnable virtue. She focuses also on Prévost’s ability to combine opposites such as French-Turk, Jansenist-libertine, decidabilityinaccessibility, and libertine-précieuse. See Joan de Jean, “Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman: Libertine Sensibilities,” in Libertine Reader, ed. Feher, 544–50. 19. The diplomat has sought to penetrate the mystery of Théophé’s birth and alienation. While Théophé only remembers having known a Greek (foster) father from Morea, the Ambassador identifies the likely biological father as Paniota Condoidi. The reintroduction of Théophé to her likely birth family fans the affections of Synèse, the youngest of her older brothers, who pursues her and is given shelter by the diplomat so that he can revive the family connection. It turns out that the brother harbors incestuous longings for his sister. 20. This involves a Sicilian, Maria Rezati, and a knight of Malta who had seduced her in contravention of his vows of celibacy. Maria is in many ways Théophé’s opposite. Brought up strictly, she was denied access to mirrors as a child, on the grounds that gazing on her own reflection might encourage vanity. Maria elopes with her lover but ends up in a harem, whereas Théophé was brought up by her foster father for a harem but escapes it for Jansenist virtue discourse. 21. Of course I am indebted to rich discussions of the gift by many, including Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and a rich series of essays titled The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990). 22. Jacques Lacan sees this more generally as the fading away of the subject that constitutes the dialectics of desire. See The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 207–8. 23. See Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, Book That Changed Europe, 257. 24. Nancy K. Miller, “L’histoire d’une Grecque moderne: No-Win Hermeneutics,”

Notes to Pages 176–183

287

in French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1995), 105–20. 25. See Philip Stewart, “The Rise of I,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13, nos. 2–3 (2001): 163–81. 26. See Colette Cazenobe, Crébillon fi ls, ou, La politique dans le boudoir (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997); and Bernadette Fort, Le langage de l’ambiguïté dans l’œuvre de Crébillon fi ls (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), 5. For the most extensive study of Crébillon’s narrative technique in English to date, see Peter V. Conroy Jr., Crébillon fi ls: Techniques of the Novel (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1972). 27. For a discussion of the recently discovered source of the translation, see Patrick Spedding, “Shameless Scribbler or Votary of Virtue? Eliza Haywood, Writing (and) Pornography in 1742,” in Women Writing, 1550–1750, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (La Trobe, Australia: Meridian, 2001), 237–51 (La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 1). See also Viktor Link, “The Reception of Crébillon’s Le Sopha in England: An Unnoticed Edition and Some Imitations,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1975): 199–203. Crébillon sent three hundred copies to his friend Lord Chesterfield in England for distribution. 28. Marie-Louise Dufrenoy demonstrates the relevance and reception history of Melon’s allegory. She also thinks of Le Sopha as the greatest oriental tale of the eighteenth century. See Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, L’Orient Romanesque en France, 1704– 1789 (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1946), 1:119. 29. Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, The Sopha: A moral tale [trans. William Hatchett and Eliza Haywood] (London, 1742), viii–ix. 30. This repetition yields some low comedy, with Schah-Baham protesting that Amanzéï’s plot twist involving the mention of Negroes is a sign of disrespect “knowing what has happen’d in my Family” (1:61). 31. See Violaine Géraud, “La scénographie conversationnelle des contes de Crébillon,” Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siècle 2 (2004): 161–73; and Christiane Mervaud, “La narration interrompue dans Le Sopha de Crébillon,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 249 (1987): 183–95. 32. Sandrine Aragon, “Les descriptions de lectrices libertines: Points d’ancrage de l’intertextualité et ouverture vers d’autres plaisirs,” Cahiers de Narratologie 13 (2006). 33. Pierre Saint-Amand, The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the EighteenthCentury French Novel (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1994), 81–96. 34. Of course, we need to reject Conroy’s assertion that compares the “emancipated, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and highly intelligent” Parisian women with “the seraglio or harem of the east where women were only slightly more than slaves” (200). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters demonstrates the freedom and sophistication of Turkish aristocratic women, as do other European observers. 35. For the discussion of Benjamin, see 244–49. 36. Conroy argues that the jump-cut cinematic montage techniques in Le Sopha are as refi ned as those in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones without the possibility of mutual influence, as Le Sopha is contemporaneous with the former (208). 37. See Thomas Pavel, “Fiction and Imitation,” Poetics Today 21, no. 3 (2000): 521–41.

288

Notes to Pages 184–187

38. Zeokinizul = Louis Quinze (XV); Kofi rans = Français (French), Krinelbol = Crébillon, etc. The English translation was titled The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofi rans from the Arabic of the famous traveler Krinelbol (London, 1749). 39. Peter V. Conroy also reminds us of the episode when the duc de Richelieu teamed up with the duc de Durfort to humiliate Madame La Martellière. See Conroy, Crébillon fi ls, 167. 40. At stake is the homosocial economy of masculinity, analyzed expertly by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick through the textual representation of an earlier English libertine moment in Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 41. Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in EighteenthCentury France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 415. 42. See Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language and Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 83–120; and Madeleine Dobie, “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the American and European Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16. 43. Lydia Vázquez, “Le Sopha et ses conséquences: Succès d’une esthétique de l’intimisme,” in Songe, illusion, égarement dans les romans de Crébillon, ed. Jean Sgard (Grenoble: Éditions littéraires et linguistiques de l’Université de Grenoble, 1996), 79–92. 44. See Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique, “métamorphose, métempsycose,” and also “métempsycose” in the Encylopédie. 45. Jean Sgard, introduction to Le Sopha, conte moral in vol. 2 of Claude Crébillon, Œuvres completes (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2000), 259. Translation mine. 46. See the story of Fadlallah and Zemroude, Spectator, no. 578, and that of Pugg the pet monkey, Spectator, no. 343. Also see Spectator, nos. 183 and 211. 47. For an excellent discussion of the Chinese and other Eastern fables brought together through the theory of transmigration in the early eighteenth century, see Chi-ming Yang, “Gross Metempsychosis and the Eastern Soul,” in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, ed. Frank Palmeri (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 13–30. 48. See Geeta Beeharry-Paray, “Les Bijoux indiscrets de Diderot: Pastiche, forgerie, ou charge du conte crébillonien?” Diderot Studies 28 (2000): 25–37. 49. Denis Diderot, Les Bijoux indiscrets, L’Oiseau blanc: conte bleu, ed. Jean Macary, Aram Vartanian, and Jean-Louis Leutrat (Paris: Hermann, 1975). All subsequent references in the text to this edition will be cited parenthetically. I have used the modern translation by Sophie Hawkes in Libertine Reader, ed. Feher, 344–541. 50. Link, “Reception of Crébillon’s Le Sopha,” 199–203. Link is wrong to say that Crébillon’s novel began the vogue for speaking objects in England—this goes back earlier, as will be explained later. 51. For general background on Bijoux, see Dictionnaire de Diderot, ed. Roland Mortier and Raymond Trousson (Paris: Champion, 1999), 77–80; Aram Vartanian, “The

Notes to Pages 188–192

289

Politics of Les Bijoux indiscrets,” in Enlightenment Studies in Honour of L. G. Crocker, ed. Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 349–76; Jeffrey Mehlman, Cataract: A Study in Diderot (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979); Angelica Goodden, Diderot and the Body (Oxford: Legenda, 2002); Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Nicolas Rousseau, Diderot: L’écriture romanesque à l’épreuve du sensible (Paris: Champion, 1997); Jean Terrasse, Le temps et l’espace dans les romans de Diderot (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,1999); and Otis Fellows, “Metaphysics and the Bijoux indiscrets: Diderot’s Debt to Prior,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 56 (1967): 509–40. 52. The episode also alludes to the initiation of police surveillance of courtiers’ sex life in the ancien régime by Mme. de Pompadour in 1747, when her protégé Nicolas René Berryer became inspector general. 53. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 79. 54. Ibid., 79. While Jules Assézat had already documented the early connection between the police reports and Bijoux, more recently Pamela Cheek has discussed this cogently in her book Sexual Antipodes, which contains a fascinating chapter on the impact of the French police surveillance of the brothels. Actresses, such as Mlles. Clairon, Dubois and Raucourt, became celebrated for their scandalous private lives just as much as for their illustrious thespian careers. Private sexual behavior was watched over by the state apparatus and consumed by the public through the mechanism of rumor. These rumors jogged the police into exploring other, more secret methods of surveillance. Pamela Cheek, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment, Globalization and the Placing of Sex (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 46–81. 55. Jean-Marie Goulemot, Ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main: Lecture et lecteurs de livres pornographiques au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Minerve, 1994). Translated into English as Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and Its Readers in EighteenthCentury France, trans. James Simpson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 56. Jane Gallop, “Snatches of Conversation,” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), 274–83. 57. See Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours, ou Journal d’un observateur (Paris, 1777–87); and Jeremy Popkin, “The Mémoires secrets and the Reading of the Enlightenment,” in The “Mémoires secrets” and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), 9–36. 58. See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60. See also the provocative discussion by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66. 59. Cheek, Sexual Antipodes, 8. 60. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 77. 61. There are several iatrogenic side effects to sex talk as a cure for Mangogul’s

290

Notes to Pages 192–195

disaffection. Discourse of sex—or sexuality—can become incitational or epistemological, empirically return to sex (or reject that overture), or become a second-order discourse of sexuality studies. When narrated by individuals, particular sexual episodes (or specific nonsexual presentations about nonsexual topics, for that matter) are marked by their provocative occasionality, specificity, and uniqueness. The contingent personal histories and bodies that crossed and mutually intercoursed become of crucial, if not overriding, importance. Yet the same episodes, when examined by sexologists or epistemologists, are evaluated and classified according to conditions linked to repeatability, generality, and universality. According to Foucault, “The West has managed not only to annex sex to a field of rationality . . . but to bring us almost entirely—our bodies, our minds, our individuality, our history—under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire.” Foucault, History of Sexuality, 78. 62. Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 204. 63. Dobie, Foreign Bodies, 107. 64. James Creech, Diderot: Thresholds of Representation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 26. 65. “L’après-midi je me rendis chez la supérieure où je trouvai une assemblée assez nombreuse des religieuses les plus jeunes et les plus jolies de la maison; les autres avaient fait leur visite et s’étaient retirées. Vous qui vous connaissez en peinture, je vous assure, M. le marquis que c’était un assez agréable tableau à voir. Imaginez un atelier de dix à douze personnes dont la plus jeune pouvait avoir quinze ans et la plus âgée n’en avait pas vingt-trois; une supérieure qui touchait à la quarantaine, blanche, fraîche, pleine d’embonpoint, à moitié levée sur son lit, avec deux mentons qu’elle portait d’assez bonne grâce, des bras ronds comme s’ils avaient été tournés, des doigts en fuseau et tous parsemés de fossettes, des yeux noirs, grands, vifs et tendres, presque jamais entièrement ouverts, à demi fermés, comme si celle qui les possédait eût éprouvé quelque fatigue à les ouvrir, des lèvres vermeilles comme la rose, des dents blanches comme le lait, les plus belles joues, une tête fort agréable enfoncée dans un oreiller profond et mollet, les bras étendus mollement à ses côtés, avec de petits coussins sous les coudes pour les soutenir. J’étais assise sur le bord de son lit et je ne faisais rien; une autre dans un fauteuil avec un petit métier à broder sur ses genoux; d’autres vers les fenêtres faisaient de la dentelle; il y en avait à terre assises sur les coussins qu’on avait ôtés des chaises, qui cousaient, qui brodaient, qui parfi laient ou qui fi laient au petit rouet. Les unes étaient blondes, d’autres brunes; aucune ne se ressemblait, quoiqu’elles fussent toutes belles; leurs caractères étaient aussi variés que leurs physionomies: celles-ci étaient sereines, celles-là gaies, d’autres sérieuses, mélancoliques ou tristes. Toutes travaillaient, excepté moi, comme je vous l’ai dit. Il n’était pas difficile de discerner les amies des indifférentes et des ennemies; les amies s’étaient placées ou l’une à côté de l’autre ou en face, et tout en faisant leur ouvrage elles causaient, elles se conseillaient, elles se regardaient furtivement, elles se pressaient les doigts sous prétexte de se donner une épingle, une aiguille, des ciseaux. La supérieure les parcourait des yeux; elle reprochait á l’une son application, á l’autre son oisiveté, à celle-ci son indifférence, á celle-là sa tristesse; elle se faisait apporter l’ouvrage, elle louait ou blâmait; elle raccom-

Notes to Pages 196–206

291

modait à l’une son ajustement de tête: Ce voile est trop avancé. . . . Ce linge prend trop du visage. . . . On ne vous voit pas assez les joues. . . . Voilà des plis qui font mal . . . elle distribuait à chacune ou de petits reproches ou de petites caresses.” Diderot, La Religieuse, ed. Georges May (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 244–45. Compare this passage with the famous one by Mary Wortley Montagu on the ladies in the Turkish harem in The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:313–15. Bijoux, followed through by La Religieuse, takes us in the direction of the marquis de Sade’s Justine, ou Les malheurs de la vertu and hence full circle from Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue rewarded to Sade’s Justine, whose virtue is repeatedly punished. 66. See the various essays in Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007). See especially in the same volume Liz Bellamy, “ItNarrators and Circulation: Defi ning a Subgenre,” 117–46. 67. Christopher Flint, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in EighteenthCentury Prose Fiction,” PMLA 113, no. 2 (1998): 215. 68. Suzanne Rodin Pucci, “The Discrete Charms of the Exotic: Fictions of the Harem in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 147. 69. Flint, “Speaking Objects,” 225. 70. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 350–51. Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment demonstrates the extent to which these projects were under way even earlier than has been described by Margaret Jacob and other scholars. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981). 71. See Thomas M. Kavanagh, “Language as Deception: Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets,” Diderot Studies 23 (1988): 101–13.

CH A PTER 5 1. See Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xx, 472. 2. See Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 3. Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: Boivin, 1935). 4. For a compelling study that focuses on the self-recognition of cultural inferiority and marginality in England until the late eighteenth century, see Alok Yadav, Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in EighteenthCentury Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 5. Gabriel de Brémond, Hattigé, or The Amours of the King of Tamaran (Amsterdam, 1680), 18.

292

Notes to Pages 206–211

6. For a fuller discussion of Montagu’s assertions about Turkish aristocratic female agency, see chap. 4 of Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 7. Ruth Herman sees Manley as politicizing and factionalizing the model of scandal fiction that she borrows from Hattigé. I have focused on the allegorical refashioning of Orientalist figuration into transcultural, rather than just national, applications. See Ruth Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003). 8. Maximillian E. Novak, “Some Notes toward A History of Fictional Forms: From Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 6, no. 2 (1973): 120–33. 9. See chap. 1 of Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, titled “Petting Oroonoko.” 10. For a defense of the Manley attribution, see John L. Sutton Jr., “The Source of Mrs. Manley’s Preface to Queen Zarah,” Modern Philology 82, no. 2 (1984): 167–72. The preface is a direct lifting from Abbé Morvan de Bellegarde’s Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale, itself a paraphrase of Sieur du Plaisir’s Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l’histoire (1683). Bellegarde’s text was addressed to women, and therefore the translator of the preface was likely a woman even if we cannot be sure it was Manley. See also Rachel Carnell, “More Borrowing from Bellegarde in Delarivier Manley’s Queen Zarah and the Zarazians,” Notes and Queries 51, no. 4 (2004): 377–79. 11. Delarivier Manley (?), The Secret History of Queen Zarah (London, 1705), 5. 12. Ibid., 6, 18. 13. Catherine Gallagher, “Political Crimes and Fictional Alibis: The Case of Delarivier Manley,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (1990): 504–5. Gallagher takes John Richetti’s pathbreaking study on Manley to task for retroactively imposing the concept of “fiction” onto Manley’s works, but we might as well argue that Gallagher is proactively denying the use of a category that she wants to guard jealously only for Richardson and Fielding. In my introductory chapter I have discussed at greater length why this categorical parsimony of Gallagher’s is misplaced. 14. Ibid., 513. 15. J. A. Downie, “What If Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?” Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 5, no. 3 (2004): 247–64. 16. John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700– 1739 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 124. 17. Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis, ed. Rosalind Ballaster (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992), 20. 18. Ibid., 121. Of course, the fiction titled The History of Queen Zarah may very well be the creation of “a medico-political quack called Joseph Browne.” See Downie, “What If Delarivier Manley Did Not Write,” 263. 19. See Milton’s passages on polygamy in A treatise on Christian doctrine compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone, trans. Charles Richard Sumner (Cambridge, UK: J. Smith, 1825). 20. See Josephine Donovan, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist Theory,” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 441–62.

Notes to Pages 211–217

293

21. Quoted in Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 112. 22. Manley, New Atalantis, 41. 23. Maximillian E. Novak, “Crime and Punishment in Defoe’s Roxana,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65, no. 3 (1966): 445–65. 24. Manley, New Atalantis, 91. 25. [Delarivier Manley], The Second Part, Or A Continuation of “The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians” (London, 1705), unpaginated. 26. Manley, New Atalantis, 3. 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Ibid., 87, 16. 29. Ibid., 82–84. See Jennifer Thorn, ed., Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722–1859 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003). 30. See Ruth Herman, “Similarities Between Delarivier Manley’s Secret History of Queen Zarah and the English Translation of Hattigé,” Notes and Queries 47, no. 2 (2000): 193–96. 31. Manley, New Atalantis, 91. 32. Ibid., 204. 33. Ibid., 210. 34. See Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 35. Manley, New Atalantis, 209. 36. Ibid., 236. 37. See Philip Stewart, “Le roman à clefs à l’époque des Lumières,” in Les dérèglements de l’art: Formes et procédures de l’illégitimité culturelle en France, 1715–1914, ed. Pierre Popovic and Erik Vigneault (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2000), 183–95. 38. Herbert Davis attributes the text (pub. 1765) to Swift in his collective edition. See Jonathan Swift, Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, Fragments and Marginalia, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 99–107; later collected in vol. 5 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), 73. 39. For a fuller discussion of levantinization, see chap. 4 of Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans. 40. See Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 123–46. 41. See Maurice Johnson, Kitagaki Muneharu, and Philip Williams, “Gulliver’s Travels” and Japan: A New Reading (Kyoto: Amherst House, Doshisha University, 1977). For an alternative suggestion of the sources being Psalmanaazaar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa and Everard Ysbrant Ides’s A Short Description of the Vast Empire of China, see John Dussinger, “Gulliver in Japan: Another Possible Source,” Notes and Queries 39, no. 4 (1992): 464–67. 42. As Markley puts it, “Englishmen in the Shogun’s palace have roughly the same standing as Gulliver at the Court of Brobdingnag.” See Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press,

294

Notes to Pages 218–219

2006), 259. For more background on Swift’s anti-Dutch feelings, see Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “Swift on the Dutch East India Merchants: The Context of 1672–73 War Literature,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1991): 235–52. For a discussion of Lilliput and Laputa as sites of Oriental despotism, see Charles H. Hinnant, Purity and Defi lement in “Gulliver’s Travels” (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 27–30, 58–59, 66–67. 43. The British oriental tale in the eighteenth century presents us with a double displacement by effectuating a secondary translation of a French exoticism. Until very recently, the most comprehensive genre study and bibliography of the French oriental tales had been by Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque en France, 1704–1789 (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1946); and for English ones, by Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). However, a very impressive study has ended the drought: see Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Galland’s Nights was immediately rivaled by François Pétis de la Croix’s Mille et un jours: Contes persans (1710–12), which neatly inverts Galland’s frame narrative. This was translated immediately as Persian Tales. In addition, see Pétis’s Turkish Tales (1708) and Abbé Bignon’s The Adventures of Abdalla, Son of Hanif (1712; trans. William Hatchett, 1729). See also chapter 1. 44. The operative premise of a 1740 spinoff underlies important works such as Richetti’s Popular Fiction before Richardson and Jerry C. Beasley, “Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, no. 4 (1981): 407. Beasley documents these fictions as employing exotic settings and relying on the contemporary vogue for the oriental tale; in his opinion the two best anti-Walpole satires are both oriental tales, namely George Lyttelton’s The Court Secret and Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai. One of the other anti-Walpole oriental tales listed by Beasley is Celenia: or, The History of Hyempsal, King of Numidia (1735). However, status varies, as Narzanes, for instance, is a very clever defense of Walpole, though each text’s preface pretends to be defamatory. 45. All references are to Eliza Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (London: Baker, 1736). This was also republished as The Unfortunate Princess (1741). For a modern edition with explanatory notes and introduction, see Earla Wilputte, ed., Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (Peterborough: Broadview, 1999). For interpretations of Eovaai, see George Frisbie Whicher, The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), 99–105; and Earla Wilputte, “The Textual Architecture of Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai,” Essays in Literature 22 (1995): 31–44. 46. Wilputte (“Textual Architecture”) suggests that some of the political equivalents in the Yximilla tale can be identified, even if the principal characters (Yximilla, Yamatalallabec, Broscomin, and Tygrinonniple) are unidentifiable. The pact between Fanharridin of Narzada and Osiphronoropho of Fayoul suggests the Bourbon Family Compact between France and Spain, and Oudescar is possibly Austrian emperor Charles VI.

Notes to Pages 219–227

295

47. One of the typical features of oriental tales is a plethora of characters with Z names. 48. Barthélemy d’Herbelot [and Antoine Galland], Bibliothèque orientale (Paris, Compagnie des librairies, 1697), 819–20. 49. Robert L. Mack, ed., Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 391. 50. See also the medieval romance L’Ystoire du Valliant Chevalier Pierre Filz du Conte de Provence et de la Belle Maguelonne. 51. See Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (New York: E. J. Brill, 1987); “Préadamite,” inEncyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (Paris, 1751–65); D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque orientale, 311, 820; and Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque, 1:22. See also Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Arts, Sciences, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960). 52. Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold L. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1973), 253, 245–62. 53. For more detail on eighteenth-century sinophilia, see Ts’un-chung Fan, “Chinese Fables and Anti-Walpole Journalism,” Review of English Studies 25, no. 98 (1949): 141–51; and Ts’un-chung Fan, Dr. Johnson and Chinese Culture (London: China Society, 1945). 54. See David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 169–81. 55. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 118. 56. While I do believe Earla Wilputte’s emendation in favor of Hypotofa is correct, antiquated typographical conventions with marginal difference between the long s and f allow an easier play between Hypotofa and hypotyposis than does a modernized approach. 57. For spectacular zoomorphosis of this sort, see “The Story of the Envious Man and Him that He Envied” in Mack, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 94–105. 58. However, republicanism—or even constitutional monarchy—is not the sole implication of such a reading, which more often than not aims to satirize without moralizing. Witness, for instance, the subsidiary attacks on the physical characteristics of what could be not just Walpole but a composite with aspects of Pope: “This great Man was born of a mean Extraction, and so deformed in his own Person, that not even his own Parents cou’d look on him with Satisfaction: To atone, however, as much as was in their power for the Imperfections of his Body, they endeavoured to cultivate his Mind with all possible Improvements.” Ochihatou studies magic and is also extremely amorous; while the power of his art could not “make any real Alteration in his Face or Shape, [it] cast such a Delusion before the Eyes of all who saw him, that he appeared to them such as he wished to be, a most comely and graceful Man.” Walpole’s depiction as an evil mage and philanderer was typical, just as Pope’s deformity and amorousness

296

Notes to Pages 227–231

were often contrasted with his poetical genius. While the Walpole connection has been discussed, it is worth considering whether some aspects of Ochihatou are Haywood’s revenge for her infamous characterization as “Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes” (Pope, Dunciad Variorum, Twickenham ed., 2.11, 155–56). Ochihatou’s spirit minions or Ypres resemble the supernatural machinery of The Rape of the Lock as much as that of the Nights. Through magic, “the most mishapen of Mankind” has rendered himself lovely and amiable (31–32). 59. John Hawkesworth, Adventurer no. 4 (November 18, 1752), cited in Ioan M. Williams, The Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: A Documentary Record (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 193. 60. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 432. 61. Ibid., 432. 62. Ibid., 432, 433. 63. Ibid., 434, 435. 64. As Haywood’s “translator” fi nesses it, “But as the Language spoken in those remote Ages, is now quite out of use, a second Objection, of equal weight with the former, may arise, concerning the true reading of the above-mentioned Records; and consequently, the Truth of all extracted from them, be liable to a Suspicion; I think myself obliged to give an exact Account of the Means by which we arriv’d at the understanding of those valuable Remains” (xii). 65. See Hayden White, “Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 88, 87–100. 66. Times Literary Supplement, October 13, 1927, 710. 67. There have been several important readings of this novella, by Margaret Anne Doody, Felicity Nussbaum, and Mita Chowdhury among others. Observing how the fiction “collapses narrative temporality in daring new ways,” Doody suggests that it nonetheless centers masculine characters in the main. Relying on the same evidence of few significant female characters, Nussbaum argues, in the opposite direction from Doody, that the male characters in the novel are in fact feminized stand-ins for female modes of behavior in the period; Nourjahad’s options are not unlike those moral and consumerist choices presented to upper-class British women at this time; therefore the novella works on its audience through the possibility of cross-gendered identification, which anticipates other generic innovations such as the 1802 melodrama and the 1813 musical play based on it. More recently, Chowdhury has posited that an ideology of progressive universalism collapses history and fiction together when Sheridan uses the oriental tale for gendered critique. See Margaret Anne Doody, “Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 324–58; Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Mita Choudhury, “Fact, Fantasy, or Mimesis? Narratives of Freedom / Imperial Masquerade,” in Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and

Notes to Pages 231–239

297

Other in the Enlightenment, ed. Laura J. Rosenthal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 255–75. 68. André Miquel, “Naissance, éclipse et résurrection,” in Mille et un contes de la nuit, ed. Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, Claude Bremond, and André Miquel (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 22. 69. For the only full-length biography of Frances Sheridan, see Alicia Le Fanu, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, Mother of the Late Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Author of “Sidney Biddulph,” “Nourjahad,” and “The Discovery” (London: Whittaker, 1824). See also Esther K. Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, 1719–1788 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967). 70. Frances Sheridan, The History of Nourjahad, in Three Oriental Tales, ed. Alan Richardson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). All subsequent citations will be parenthetical references in the text to this edition. 71. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 24. 72. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center, 1958). For the sake of efficiency I have italicized all Proppian functions that I mention in this paragraph and the next that are taken verbatim from Propp. All italicized categories, identified by Propp as characterfunctions within the folktale, are clearly applicable to Sheridan’s novella. 73. See James Miller and John Hoadly, Mahomet the Impostor: A Tragedy (London, 1744), a hostile portrait of the prophet of Islam as “A Pilf’ring Camel-Driver, one so vile / His own vile Crew renounc’d him” (9). During the course of the play, the prophet is characterized as “arrogant Imposter,” “tyrant,” “obscure seditious Innovator,” “Idol,” and “Villain, or Enthusiast.” The brawl that resulted in the theater’s destruction derived from political affiliations. An anticourt faction began rioting on the premise that further challenges to authority had been suppressed in deference to the establishment. 74. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 166. See also Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 404. 75. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 167. 76. See Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1998). It is worth speculating whether Sheridan might have been aware of Nicolas Boulanger’s The Origin and Progress of Despotism. In the Oriental, and Other Empires of Africa, Europe and America (1764), a popularization of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws that also went through several English editions. 77. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 90. 78. Literary criticism needs to engage with the cognitivist approaches of deictic shift theory (DST) in order to loosen itself from the straitjacket of national realism. If the national realist norm is allowed to function as unmarked referential ground or topology, it ends up designating all other constructions as fi gures, projections, or Orientalia. Although the norm cannot be dislodged easily, it can be challenged in order to re-

298

Notes to Pages 239–244

center other perspectives and artifacts. For a seminal collection laying out the premises of deictic shift theory, see Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt, ed., Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995). 79. For a superb edition with a comprehensive introduction, notes, and key, see Tobias Smollett, The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. Robert Adams Day (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 80. See Robert Adams Day, introduction to History and Adventures of an Atom, xxv. 81. For my brief thoughts concerning the vitalist residue of modern theories of the novel including those by Bakhtin, Watt, and Lukács, see Srinivas Aravamudan, “Refusing the Death of the Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 1 (2011): 20–22. 82. For a useful discussion of Shebbeare’s text and its influence on Smollett, see James R. Foster, “Smollett and the Atom,” PMLA 68, no. 5 (1953): 1032–46. 83. Atom claims that Japan has fourteen religious sects, comparable to the schismatic Dissenting sects in eighteenth-century Britain. See Smollett, History and Adventures of an Atom, 13. 84. See Critical Review, September 1759, 189–90; cited in Day, introduction to History and Adventures of an Atom, xliii–xliv. 85. In Shebbeare’s text, England is Sumatra, London is Achin, Spain is Cochin China, Hanover is Golconda, and the Georges are Amuraths. 86. Day, key to History and Adventures of an Atom, 251. 87. Along with the scatological reference of “Kaka,” it should be pointed out that fica is the Italian for “pussy” in the same way that chatte is in French. 88. History and Adventures of an Atom, 17. 89. Ibid., 24. 90. Ibid., 9. Smollett writes sarcastically in Briton (November 13, 1762), “I would rather have the K[ing] of E[ngland] like the last Caliphs of Bagdat, or the Dairo of Japan, or that race of sovereigns, known in France by the epithet Fainéans.” 91. For an interesting discussion of satire and fantasy in Smollett’s Atom in relation to party politics, see John Skinner, Constructions of Smollett: A Study of Genre and Gender (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 161–76. For an approach that locates Smollett’s novels including Atom in relation to material reality and corporeal vulnerability, see Aileen Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), especially 130–61.

conclusion 1. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel; A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 41. 2. Heidegger suggests that boredom can be only a modern condition of being— Benjamin clearly disagrees. See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William Mc Neill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Notes to Pages 245–253

299

3. The power of Romanticist nostalgia makes even a polymath such as Benjamin fl irt with anti-intellectualism. 4. As Jack Goody argues beautifully, this might be appearance only rather than established fact. Goody makes a powerful case for epic’s being the preferred mode for societies at a stage of early literacy rather than preliterate societies, as it has often been assumed in studies of Homer under the influence of Melman Parry and Jack Lord. See Jack Goody, “From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling,” in The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3–36. Many factors contributed to the suppression of orality in the eighteenth century. For a discussion of the suppression of orality by Puritanism, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of EighteenthCentury English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 141–56. 5. James Joyce, “Araby,” in Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1967), 29–35. For a reading of the peculiar structure of temporality in the work, see Ranjana Khanna, “ ‘Araby’: Women’s Time and the Time of the Nation,” in Joyce: Feminism/Post/Colonialism, ed. Ellen Carol Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 81–101. 6. Joyce, “Araby,” 31; see also Donald T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 52–67. 7. Ibid., 32. 8. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), chapter 17, 11.2319–32. 9. For a broad survey of the multiple backgrounds to nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Irish Orientalism, see Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004). 10. For some of the forays into the deep influence of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights on Joyce, see Zack Bowen, “All in a Night’s Entertainment: The Codology of Haroun al Raschid, the Thousand and One Nights, Bloomusalem/Baghdad, the Uncreated Conscience of the Irish Race, and Joycean Self-Reflexivity,” James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (1998): 297–307; and Carol Loeb Shloss, “ ‘Behind the Veil:’ James Joyce and the Colonial Harem,” James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (1998): 33–47. 11. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1999), 51, 485, 116. 12. See Aida Yared, “Joyce’s Sources: Sir Richard F. Burton’s ‘Terminal Essay’ in Finnegans Wake,” Joyce Studies Annual 11 (2000): 124–66. 13. See Edward Said, “Travelling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–27; see also above 263n26.

Bibliogr aph y

Abbott, Nabia. “A Ninth Century Fragment of the Thousand Nights: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8, no. 3 (1949): 129–61. Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Addison, Joseph. “The Vision of Mirza.” The Spectator 159, September 1, 1711. Adkins, Gregory Matthew. “When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle.” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 3 (2000): 433–52. Agorni, Mirella. “ ‘The Voice of the Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter.” Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 181–95. Alexander, William. The History of Women, from the earliest antiquity, to the present time. London: Strahan, 1779. Algarotti, Francesco. Il Newtonianismo per le dame, ovvero, dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori. Naples, 1737. Ali, Muhsin Jassim. Scheherezade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Criticism of “The Arabian Nights.” Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1981. Allen, Don Cameron. The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. Almansi, Guido, and Donald Warren. “ ‘L’esploratore turco’ di Giovanni Paolo Marana.” Studi Secenteschi Rivista Annuale 9 (1968): 159–83. Amer, Sahar. Ésop au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. ———. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. New York: Verso, 1998. Anderson, Perry. “Persian Letters (Montesquieu, 1721).” In The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, edited by Franco Moretti, 161–72. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

301

302

Bibliogr aphy

Andrea, Bernadette. Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Anghie, Anthony. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Anonymous. The Amours of the Sultana of Barbary. London: R. Baldwin, 1689 ———. Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to His Friend at Trebisond. London: W. Owen, 1757. ———. The Pagan Prince: or a comical history of the heroick atchievements of the Palatine of Eboracum. Amsterdam, 1690. ———. “Prefatory Discourse on the Usefulness of Romances.” In Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s Mogul Tales, or the Dreams of Men Awake. London, 1736. ———. Tales of Inatulla. London, 1768. ———. Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours, uu Journal d’un observateur. Paris, 1777–1787. Anson, George. A Voyage Round the World In the Years 1740, 1741, 1742, 1743, 1744. London, 1748. App, Urs. The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Appleton, William. A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Octagon Books, 1979. Aragon, Sandrine. “Les descriptions de lectrices libertines: Points d’ancrage de l’intertextualité et ouverture vers d’autres plaisirs,” Cahiers de narratologie 13 (2006), unpaginated. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “The Adventure Chronotope and the Oriental Xenotrope: Galland, Sheridan and Joyce Domesticate The Arabian Nights.” In The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West, edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, 235–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. “East Indies and West Indies: Comparative Misapprehensions.” Anthropological Forum 16, no. 3 (2006): 291–309. ———. “Fiction/Translation/Transnation.” In A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, edited by Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, 48–74. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. ———. Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. “Hobbes and America.” In The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 36–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 1, no. 33 (1999): 5–31. ———. “Orientalism.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, edited by David Scott Kastan, 143–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “Refusing the Death of the Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 1 (2011): 20–22. ———. Review of Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 by Ros Ballaster. Modern Language Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2008): 295–29.

Bibliogr aphy

303

———. Review of Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature by Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Modern Language Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2003): 130–35. ———. Review of Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay by Balachandra Rajan. Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2001): 74–78. ———. “Talking Jewels and Other Oriental Seductions.” In Diderot and European Culture, edited by Anthony Strugnell and Frédéric Ogée, 15–34. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006. ———. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism.” In The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, edited by Franco Moretti, 349–88. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Ascari, Maurizio. “The Role of Addison’s Dream Visions and Oriental Tales in the Nascent Poetics of Short Fiction.” Textus: English Studies in Italy 18, no. 1 (2005): 11–24. Atal, G. Z. (G. A. Russell). “Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan: The First Psychological Novel.” In Texte und Kontexte: Studien zur Deutschen und Vergleichenden Litteraturwissenschaft, edited by M. Durzak, E. Reichmann, and U. Weisstein, 9–27. Bern, Switzerland: Francke Verlag, 1973. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. New York: Routledge, 1993. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel).” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern W. McGee, 10–59. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. “Playing the Second String: The Role of Dinarzade in Eighteenth Century English Fiction.” In “The Arabian Nights” in Historical Context: Between East and West, edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, 83–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction, from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Beasley, Jerry C. “Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14, no. 4 (1981): 406–31. Beattie, James. “On Fable and Romance.” In Dissertations Moral and Critical. London, 1783.

304

Bibliogr aphy

Beckford, William. Vathek. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (orig. 1786). Beecher, Donald, John Butler, and Carmine Di Biase. Introduction to The Moral Philosophy of Doni popularly known as The Fables of Bidpai, by Sir Thomas North, edited by Beecher, Butler, and Di Biase, 11–101. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2003. Beeharry-Paray, Geeta. “Les Bijoux indiscrets de Diderot: Pastiche, forgerie ou charge du conte Crébillonien?” Diderot Studies 28 (2000): 21–37. Behn, Aphra. A Discovery of New Worlds from the French Made English by Mrs A. Behn. London, 1688. ———. The Emperor of the Moon: A Farce. As It Is Acted by Their Majesties Servants, at the Queens Theatre. London: R. Holt, 1687. ———. Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. London: Randal Taylor, 1684. ———. Oroonoko. In vol. 3 of The Works of Aphra Behn, edited by Janet Todd. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995. Bellamy, Liz. “It-Narrators and Circulation: Defi ning a Subgenre.” In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, 117–46. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, translated by Edmund Jephcott et al., edited by Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, 143–66. Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2002. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66. Bernier, François. “Lettre à M. Chapelain du 4 Octobre 1667 touchant des superstitions des indous.” In Suite des mémoires. Paris, 1671. Bhatta, Somadeva. The Ocean of Story: being C.H. Tawney’s translation of Somadeva’s katha¯ sarit sa¯gara; or, Ocean of streams of story. Translated by C. H. Tawney, edited by N. M. Penzer. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968. [Bignon, Jean Paul]. The Adventures of Abdalla, Son of Hanif. Translated by William Hatchett. London, 1729. Billingsley, Dale B. “Gulliver, Mandeville, and Capital Crime.” Notes and Queries 30, no. 1 (1983): 32–33. Blackwell, Mark, ed. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Blewett, David. Defoe’s Art of Fiction: “Robinson Crusoe,” “Moll Flanders,” “Colonel Jack,” and “Roxana.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. ———. Introduction to Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, by Daniel Defoe, 9–25. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982. Bloch, R. Howard. “The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2004): 69–83. Boas, George. The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933. Bond, Donald, ed. The Spectator. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Booth, Wayne C. “ ‘The Self-Portraiture of Genius’: The Citizen of the World and Critical Method.” Modern Philology 73, no. 4 (1976): S85–96. Boulanger, Nicolas Antoine. The Origin and Progress of Despotism: In the Oriental,

Bibliogr aphy

305

and other Empires of Africa, Europe, and America. Translated by John Wilkes. Amsterdam, 1764. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Bowen, Zack. “All in a Night’s Entertainment: The Codology of Haroun Al Raschid, the Thousand and One Nights, Bloomusalem/Baghdad, the Uncreated Conscience of the Irish Race, and Joycean Self-Reflexivity.” James Joyce Quarterly 35, no. 2–3 (1998): 297–307. Bowers, Toni. Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Boyle, Frank T. Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. [Boyle, Robert]. “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small, Imparted Likewise by Mr. Boyle.” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–66): 186–89. Braun, Theodore. “La chaîne secrète: A Decade of Interpretations.” French Studies 42 (1988): 278–91. Brooks, Christopher. “Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World: Knowledge and the Imposture of ‘Orientalism.’ “ Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 35, no. 1 (1993): 124–44. Brown, Homer Obed. “Prologue: Why the Story of the Origin of the (English) Novel Is an American Romance (If Not the Great American Novel).” In Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, 11–43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. ———. Institutions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. ———. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Brun, Christelle. “L’Abbé Prévost: De la sensibilité à la spiritualité.” Travaux de Littérature 21 (2008): 205–21. Brunt, Samuel. A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, with a description of religion, policy, customs and manners of that country. London: Watson, 1727. Bulstrode, Whitelocke. An Essay of Transmigration in Defence of Pythagoras, or a Discourse of Natural Philosophy. London: Basset, 1692. Burke, Edmund. The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings. London, 1796. Burton, Jonathan. “Emplotting the Early Modern Mediterranean.” In Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, edited by Goran V. Stanivukovic, 21–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Bussy-Rabutin, Roger de, count de. Histoire amoureuse des Gaules. Paris: L’Hopital des Foux, 1666. Byatt, A. S. “Narrate or Die: Why Scheherazade Keeps On Talking.” New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999. Calder, Martin. Encounters with the Other: A Journey to the Limits of Language through Works by Rousseau, Defoe, Prévost and Graffigny. New York: Rodopi, 2003.

306

Bibliogr aphy

Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Caracciolo, Peter L. “Introduction: Such a Store House of Ingenious Fiction and Splendid Imagery.” In “The Arabian Nights” in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of “The Thousand and One Nights” into British Culture, edited by Peter Caracciolo, 1–80. London: Macmillan, 1988. Carey, Daniel, and Lynn Festa. “Some Answers to the Question: ‘What Is Postcolonial Enlightenment?’ “ In The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 1–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Carnell, Rachel. “More Borrowing from Bellegarde in Delavirier Manley’s Queen Zarah and the Zarazians.” Notes and Queries 51, no. 4 (2004): 377–79. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. Cavendish, Margaret. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World and other writings. New York: New York University Press, 1992 (orig. 1666). Cazenobe, Colette. Crébillon fi ls, ou, La politique dans le boudoir. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997. Challes, Robert. Les illustres françaises. Paris: Libraire générale française, 1996. Cheek, Pamela. Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment, Globalization and the Placing of Sex. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Chew, Samuel C. “An English Precursor of Rousseau.” Modern Language Notes 32, no. 6 (1917): 321–37. Choudhury, Mita. “Fact, Fantasy, or Mimesis? Narratives of Freedom/Imperial Masquerade.” In Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment, edited by Laura J. Rosenthal, 255–75. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Chraïbi, Aboubakr. “Galland’s ‘Ali Baba’ and Other Arabic Versions.” Marvels and Tales 18, no. 2 (2004): 159–69. Clutton-Brock, Alan Francis. “A Moral Tale.” Times Literary Supplement, October 13, 1927. Coetzee, J. M. Foe. New York: Viking, 1987. Cohen, Margaret, and Carolyn Dever, ed. The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Conant, Martha Pike. The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908. Conroy, Peter V., Jr. Crébillon fi ls: Techniques of the Novel. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1972. Cosentini, John W. Fontenelle’s Art of Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. Costa Lima, Luiz. Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern

Bibliogr aphy

307

Times. Translated by Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. “The Control of the Imagination and the Novel.” In The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti, 37–68. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Coventry, Francis. The History of Pompey the Little: or, the life and adventures of a lap-dog. London, 1751. Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de. L’Écumoire [ou Tanzaï et Néadarne], histoire japonaise. London, 1735. ———. The Skimmer, or The History of Tanzaï and Néadarné. London, 1735. ———. The Sopha: A moral tale. Translated by William Hatchett and Eliza Haywood. London, 1742. ———. Les égarements du cœur et de l’esprit. Paris: Flammarion, 1985 (orig. 1736–38). ———. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Jean Sgard. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2000. Creech, James. Diderot: Thresholds of Representation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. Cusset, Catherine. “La loi de l’intérêt ou la naissance du sujet moderne dans Histoire d’une Grecque moderne de l’Abbé Prévost.” In Le travail des Lumières. Pour Georges Benrekessa, edited by Caroline Jacot Grapa, Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, Yannick Séité, and Carine Trevisan, 189–99. Paris: Champion, 2002. Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de. Histoire comique: Contenant les états et empires de la Lune. Paris: de Sercy, 1657. D’Herbelot, Barthélemy, [and Antoine Galland]. Bibliothèque orientale. Paris: Compagnie des libraires, 1697. Dacier, André. The Life of Pythagoras. Translated by Nicholas Rowe. London: Jacob Tonson, 1707. Dagen, Jean. “Fontenelle et l’épicurisme.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 103 (2003): 397–414. ———. “Refléxions sur les mondes de Fontenelle.” Littérature classique 22 (1994): 127–44. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Day, Robert Adams. Introduction to The History and Adventures of an Atom, by Tobias Smollett, edited by Day, xxv–xlviii. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. de Brémond, Gabriel. Hattigé, or The Amours of the King of Tamaran. Amsterdam, 1680. de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. de Fatouville, Anne Mauduit, dit Nolant de Fatouville. Arlequin, Empereur dans la Lune. Troyes, France: Garnier, 1684. de Jean, Joan. “Prévost’s The Story of A Modern Greek Woman: Libertine Sensibilities.” In The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Michael Feher, 544–50. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

308

Bibliogr aphy

Defoe, Daniel. The Family Instructor. London: E. Matthews, 1715–18. ———. The Fortunate Mistress, or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle De Beleau, Afterwards Call’d the Countess De Wintselsheim, in Germany; Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II. London: T. Warner, 1724. ———. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Edited by George Harris Healey. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955. ———. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. Edited by Jane Jack. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. ———. Serious reflections during the life and surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the angelic world. London: Taylor, 1720. [Defoe, Daniel]. A Continuation of the Letters Written by a Turkish Spy. London, 1718. Delon, Michel. “La Marquise et Le Philosophe.” Revue des sciences humaines 54, no. 182 (1981): 65–78. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and The Sovereign, vol. 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ———. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. “The Law of Genre.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 51–77. ———. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Desgraves, Louis. “Montesquieu et Fontenelle.” In Fontenelle: Actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 Octobre 1987, edited by Alain Niderst. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989. Dick, Steven J. Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Diderot, Denis. Les Bijoux indiscrets, L’Oiseau blanc: Conte bleu. Edited by Aram Vartanian, Jean-Louis Leutrat, and Jean Macary. Paris: Hermann, 1975. ———. La Religieuse. Edited by Georges May. Paris: Hermann, 1975. Diderot, Denis, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Paris, 1751–65. Dirks, Nicholas. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006. Dobie, Madeleine. Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. “Orientalism, Colonialism, and Furniture in Eighteenth-Century France.” In Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the American and European Past, edited by Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, 13–36. New York: Routledge, 2007. ———. “Translation in the Contact Zone: Antoine Galland’s Mille et une nuits: contes arabes.” In The “Arabian Nights” in Historical Context: Between East and West, edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, 25–49. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dodsley, R[obert]. Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists: In three books. London, 1761.

Bibliogr aphy

309

Donovan, Josephine. “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist Theory.” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 441–62. ———. Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. Doody, Margaret Anne. “Frances Sheridan: Morality and Annihilated Time.” In Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, 324–58. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986. ———. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Dooley, Brendan. The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Douay, Françoise. “Le style oriental en France de 1675 à 1800.” In Polymnie ou la rhétorique comme théâtre du sens, 183–96. Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2001. Douglas, Aileen. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Downie, J. A.”What If Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?” Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 5, no. 3 (2004): 247–64. Du Halde, J. B. Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. Paris: Lemercier, 1735. Du Plaisir. Sentimens sur les Lettres, et sur l’Histoire, avec des Scrupules sur le Stile. Paris, 1683. ———. Unattributed preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, by Delarivier Manley. London, 1705. Duchan, Judith F., Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt, ed. Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. Duchet, Michèle. Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Dufrenoy, Marie-Louise. L’Orient romanesque en France, 1704–1789. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1946. Dufresny, Charles Rivière. Amusemens sérieux et comiques ou nouveau recueil de bons-mots, de railleries fi nes, de pensees ingenieuses & delicates, de bons contes, & d’avantures plaisantes; a l’usage de ceux qui veulent aprendre le Francois, ou l’Anglois. The Hague: Vaillant, 1719. Dussinger, John. “Gulliver in Japan: Another Possible Source.” Notes and Queries 39, no 4 (December 1992): 464–67. Edsall, H. Linn. “The Idea of History and Progress in Fontenelle and Voltaire.” In Studies by Members of the French Department of Yale University, edited by Albert Feuillerat, 163–84. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941. Ekstein, Nina. “Appropriation and Gender: The Case of Catherine Bernard and Bernard De Fontenelle.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 59–80. Emerson, Caryl, and Gary Saul Morson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Evans, John E., and John J. Wall. A Guide to Prose Fiction in the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.” New York: Garland, 1977.

310

Bibliogr aphy

Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fan, Ts’un-chung. “Chinese Fables and Anti-Walpole Journalism.” Review of English Studies 25, no. 98 (1949): 141–51. ———. Dr. Johnson and Chinese Culture. London: China Society, 1945. Fara, Patricia. “Heavenly Bodies: Newtonianism, Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds Debate in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 35 (2004): 143–60. Feher, Michel, ed. The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury France. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Fellows, Otis. “Metaphysics and the Bijoux indiscrets: Diderot’s Debt to Prior.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 56 (1967): 509–40. Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe. Les aventures de Télémaque. London: 1699. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Edited by Sheridan Baker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. ———. Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Flint, Christopher. “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in EighteenthCentury Prose Fiction.” PMLA 113, no. 2 (1998): 212–26. Fontenelle, Bernard le Bouyer. De l’origine des fables. Paris: Alcan, 1932 [1724]. ———. Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes. Edited by Christophe Martin. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. ———. Histoire des Ajaoïens. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998. ———. Nouveaux dialogues des morts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. ———. Poesies pastorales de M.D.F.: Avec un traité sur la nature de l’eglogue, & une digression sur les anciens & les modernes. Paris: Guerout, 1688. Fort, Bernadette. Le langage de l’ambiguïté dans l’œuvre de Crébillon fi ls. Paris: Klincksieck, 1978. Foster, James R. “Smollett and the Atom.” PMLA 68, no. 5 (1953): 1032–46. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 2007. ———. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Basic Books, 1968. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1980. ———. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. ———. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Fresnoy, Lenglet du. De l’usage des romans. Amsterdam, 1734. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Literary Marketplace, 1670–1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Bibliogr aphy

311

———. “Political Crimes and Fictional Alibis: The Case of Delarivier Manley.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (1990): 502–21. ———. “The Rise of Fictionality.” In The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti, 336–63. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Galland, Antoine. Les mille et une nuits: Contes arabes traduits par Galland. Paris: Garnier, 1988. ———. Les paroles remarquables des Orientaux. Paris, 1694. Gallop, Jane. “Snatches of Conversation.” In Women and Language in Literature and Society, edited by Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, 274–83. New York: Praeger, 1980. Garcia, Humberto. “Islam in the English Radical Protestant Imagination, 1660–1830.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. Gardiner, Anne Barbeau. “Swift on the Dutch East India Merchants: The Context of 1672–73 War Literature.” Huntington Library Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1991): 235–52. Gaudier, Jean-Pierre, and Jean-Jacques Heirwegh. “Jean-Paul Marana, L’espion du grand seigneur, et l’histoire des idées.” Études sur le XVIIIe siècle 8 (1981): 25–51. Gaultier, Abbé. Les Lettres persanes convaincues d’impiété. Paris, 1751. Géraud, Violaine. “La scénographie conversationnelle des contes de Crébillon.” Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siècle 2 (2004): 161–73. Gerhardt, Mia I. The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the “Thousand and One Nights.” Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963. Ghazoul, Ferial Jabouri. Nocturnal Poetics: “The Arabian Nights” in Comparative Context. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 1996. Gibb, H. A. R. The Legacy of Islam. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Gibbon, Edward. The English Essays of Edward Gibbon. Edited by Patricia B. Craddock. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Gibbes, Phebe. Hartly House, Calcutta. Edited by Michael Franklin. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007 (orig. 1789). Gildon, Charles. The Golden Spy. London: Morphew, 1709. Gill, James E. “Beast over Man: Theriophilic Paradox in Gulliver’s ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms.’ “ Studies in Philology 67, no. 4 (1970): 532–49. Glanvill, Joseph. Lux Orientalis: or an Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages concerning the Præexistence of Souls. London: 1662. Godwin, Francis. The Man in the Moone. Peterborough, UK: Broadview, 2009. Goldberg, Rita. Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Goldsmith, Oliver. Citizen of the World. In The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, edited by Arthur Friedman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Goodden, Angelica. Diderot and the Body. Oxford: Legenda, 2002. Goodfellow, Sarah. “ ‘Such Masculine Strokes’: Aphra Behn as Translator of a Discovery of New Worlds.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): 229–50. Goodman, Dena. Criticism in Action: Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Goody, Jack. “From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytell-

312

Bibliogr aphy

ing.” In The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, edited by Franco Moretti, 3–36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Goulemot, Jean-Marie. Ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main: Lecture et lecteurs de livres pornographiques au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Minerve, 1994. ———. Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and Its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France. Translated by James Simpson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Gouvest, Jean Henri Maubert de. Lettres iroquoises. Irocopolis [Lausanne]: chez les Vénérables [Bousquet], 1752. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Grenby, Mark O. “Orientalism and Propaganda: The Oriental Tale and Popular Politics in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 215–37. Grosrichard, Alain. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1998. Guilleragues, Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, Viscomte de. Lettres Portugaises. Paris: Barbin, 1669. Guillory, John. “Enlightening Mediation.” In This Is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, 37–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Guy, Basil. “Ad majorem Societatis gloriam: Jesuit Perspectives on Chinese Mores in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Exoticism and the Enlightenment, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, 66–85. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Hamilton, Charles. An Historical Relation of the Origin, Progress, and Final Dissolution of the Government of the Rohilla Afgans. London: Kearsley, 1787. Hamilton, Elizabeth. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Edited by Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell. Ontario: Broadview, 2004 (orig. 1796). Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Harootunian, Harry. “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem.” boundary 2 32, no. 2 (2005): 23–52. [Harris, Joseph]. The Instructive and Entertaining Fables of Pilpay, An Ancient Indian Philosopher: Containing a Number of Excellent Rules for the Conduct of Persons of all Ages, and in all Stations; Under several Heads. London, 1747. Hassan, Nawal Muhammad. Hayy bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe: A Study of an Early Arabic Impact on English Literature. Baghdad: Al Rashid House for Publication, 1980. Hatchett, William. The Chinese orphan, an historical tragedy. London: Charles Corbett, 1741. Hawes, Clement. “Three Times round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse.” Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 187–214. Hawkesworth, John. “Of the different kinds of Narrative, and why they are universally read.” The Adventurer, November 18, 1754. Haywood, Eliza Fowler. Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo. London: Baker, 1736. ———. Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo. Edited by Earla Wilputte. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999.

Bibliogr aphy

313

———. Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia. London, 1725. Hazard, Paul. La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715. Paris: Boivin, 1935. Head, Richard. The English Rogue: described in the life of Meriton Latroon, a witty extravagant, being a complete history of the most eminent cheats of both sexes. London: Routledge, 2002 (orig. 1665). Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Hellman, Mimi. “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in EighteenthCentury France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 415–45. Herman, Ruth. The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. ———. “Similarities between Delarivier Manley’s Secret History of Queen Zarah and the English Translation of Hattigé.” Notes and Queries 47, no. 2 (2000): 193–96. Hermans, Jan, and Paul Pelckmans, eds. Prévost et le récit bref. New York: Rodopi, 2006. Hinnant, Charles H. Purity and Defi lement in “Gulliver’s Travels.” New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Hitzel, Frédéric. “Les jeunes de langues de Péra-les-Constantinople.” Dix-huitième siècle 28 (1996): 57–70. Hodges, William. Travels in India, during the years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783. London, 1793. Hoegberg, David E. “Caesar’s Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko.” EighteenthCentury Fiction 7, no. 3 (1995): 239–58. Hole, Richard. Remarks on the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments”; in Which The “Origin of Sinbad’s Voyages,” and “Other Oriental Fictions,” Is Particularly Considered. London: Cadell and Davies, 1797. Howells, Robin. “The Principle of Mobility in Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes.” French Studies 46, no. 2 (1992): 129–43. Huet, Pierre-Daniel. The History of Romances: An Enquiry into Their Original. Translated by Stephen Lewis. London: J. Hooke and T. Caldecott, 1715. ———. Lettre-traité de Pierre-Daniel Huet sur l’origine des Romans. Edited by Fabienne Gégou. Paris: Nizet, 1971 (orig. 1670). ———. Traité de l’origine des Romans. Paris: Claude Barbin, 1670. ———. A Treatise of Romances and their Original. Translated by Roger L’Estrange. London: R. Battersby, 1672. Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by Dorothy Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Humphreys, Samuel. Translator’s preface to Peruvian Tales by Thomas-Simon Gueullette, translated by Samuel Humphreys, xii. London, 1734. Hundert, E. J. “Sexual Politics and the Allegory of Identity in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.” Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation 31, no. 2 (1990): 101–15. Hunt, Lynn, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt. The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s “Religious Ceremonies of the World”. Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2010.

314

Bibliogr aphy

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. ———. “The Novel and Social/Cultural History.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti, 9–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe (with an Excursus on the Farther Adventures of Ian Watt and Two Notes on the Present State of Literary Studies).” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, nos. 2–3 (2000): 227–37. Huygens, Christiaan. Cosmotheoros: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets. London, 1698. Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. New York: Penguin, 1994. ———. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2006. ———. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2007. Israel, Jonathan Irvine. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jacob, Margaret C. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Jacobs, Joseph. The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai. London: David Nutt, 1888. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. Javadi, Hasan. Persian Literary Influence on English Literature. Calcutta: Iran Society, 1983. Johnson, Maurice, Kitagaki Muneharu, and Philip Williams, Gulliver’s Travels and Japan: A New Reading. Kyoto: Amherst House, Doshisha University, 1977. Johnson, Rebecca Carol, Richard Maxwell, and Katie Trumpener. “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel.” Modern Language Quarterly 68, no 2 (2007): 243–79. Johnson, Samuel. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. London, 1790–91. ———. The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal. London: Dodsley, 1749. Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1967. ———. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin, 1999. ———. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986. Kaempfer, Engelbert. The History of Japan: Together with a Description of the Kingdom of Siam, 1690–92. London: J. MacLehose, 1906. Kale, M. R, ed. The Hitopades´a of Na¯ra¯yan.a. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1967. Kames, Lord. Elements of Criticism. 3rd ed. Edinburgh: A. Millar, 1765. Kamuf, Peggy. “The Gift of Clothes: Of Mme de Lafayette and the Origin of Novels.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 17, no. 3 (1984): 233–45.

Bibliogr aphy

315

Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbet, 54–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kaul, Suvir. “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal.” PMLA 105 (1990): 220–32. Kavanagh, Thomas M. “Language as Deception: Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets.” Diderot Studies 23 (1988): 101–13. Kay, Donald. Short Fiction in the “Spectator.” Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975. Kelly, Anne Cline. “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Keeper: Talking Animals in Book IV.” English Literary History 74 (2007): 323–49. Kelly, Gary. Woman, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Khanna, Ranjana. “ ‘Araby’: Women’s Time and the Time of the Nation.” In Joyce: Feminism/Post/Colonialism, edited by Ellen Carol Jones, 81–101. New York: Rodopi, 1998. Kietzman, Mary Jo. “Defoe Masters the Serial Subject.” English Literary History 66 (1999): 677–705. Kinoshita, Sharon. “Translatio/n, Empire, and the Worlding of Medieval Literature: The Travels of Kalila wa dimna.” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 371–85. Kircher, Athanasius. China Illustrata: with sacred and secular monuments, various spectacles of nature and art and other memorabilia. Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar, 1979 (orig. 1667). Kra, Pauline. “The Invisible Chain of the Lettres persanes.” Studies on Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century 23 (1963): 7–60. La Fayette, Madame de. La princesse de Clèves. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. La Fontaine, Jean de. Fables. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. Landry, Donna. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Laurens, Henry. Aux sources de l’orientalisme: La bibliothèque orientale de Barthelemi d’Herbelot. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1978. Lavicka, Jan. “L’espion turc, le monde slave, et le hussitisme.” XVIIe Siècle 110, no. 11 (1976): 75–92. Le Fanu, Alicia. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan, Mother of the Late Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Author of “Sidney Biddulph,” “Nourjahad,” and “The Discovery.” London: Whittaker, 1824. Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lennon, Joseph Allen. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Boston, Beacon, 1963. Lewis, Jayne. The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Link, Viktor. “The Reception of Crébillon’s Le Sopha in England: An Unnoticed Edition and Some Imitations.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 132 (1975): 199–203.

316

Bibliogr aphy

Lock, F. P. The Politics of “Gulliver’s Travels.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Longino, Michèle. Orientalism in French Classical Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Loveridge, Mark. A History of Augustan Fable. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Lynch, Deidre, and William Warner, eds. Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Lyttelton, George. Letters from a Persian in England to His Friend at Isfahan. 5th ed. London, 1744. Mack, Robert L., ed. Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Other ‘Oriental’ Tales.” In Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 3, 1660–1790, edited by Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, 470–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Magnot-Ogilvy, Florence. “Paroles à vendre: Circulation d’argent et circulation de récits dans le roman-mémoires à la fi n des années 1730.” In Art et argent en France au temps des Premiers Modernes (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), edited by Martial Poirson, 173–84. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004. Mahdi, Muhsin, ed. The Thousand and One Nights: Alf Layla Wa-Layla from the Earliest Known Sources. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984–94. Makdisi, Saree, and Felicity Nussbaum, ed. “The Arabian Nights” in Historical Context: Between East and West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Malcolmson, Cristina. “Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society.” In Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, edited by Frank Palmeri, 49–66. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Mallinson, G. J. “Usbek, Language and Power: Images of Authority in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes.” French Forum 18, no. 1 (1993): 23–36. Manley, Delarivier. Letters Written by Mrs. Manley. London: R.B., 1696. ———. The New Atalantis. Edited by Rosalind Ballaster. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992. [Manley, Delarivier.] Memoirs of Europe, Towards the Close of the Eighth Century. London: Morphew, 1710. ———.The Secret History of Queen Zarah. London, 1705. ———. The Second Part, Or A Continuation of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians. London, 1705. Mantz, Harold Elmer. “Non-dramatic Pastoral in Europe in the Eighteenth Century.” PMLA 31, no. 3 (1916): 421–47. Marana, Giovanni Paolo. Letters Written by a Turkish Spy Who Lived Five-and-Forty Years Undiscovered at Paris. London: Vernor and Hood, 1801.

Bibliogr aphy

317

Markley, Robert. “Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange and Ritual in Edward Page’s ‘Secret History.’ “ In The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 215–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ———. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. “Global Analogies: Cosmology, Geosymmetry and Skepticism in Some Works of Aphra Behn.” In Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, edited by Juliet Cummins and David Burchell, 189–212. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Markoe, Peter. The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, or Letters Written By a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America. Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1787. Marsak, Leonard M. “Bernard De Fontenelle: In Defense of Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959): 111–22. ———. “The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 49, no. 7 (1959): 1–64. Martin, Christophe. “Présentation.” In Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, by Bernard de Fontenelle and edited by Christophe Martin, 23–25. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Martínez de Bujanda, Jesús. Index librorum prohibitorum (1600–1966). Montreal: Mediaspaul, 2002. Marzolph, Ulrich, and Richard van Leeuwen, eds. The “Arabian Nights” Encyclopedia. Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Maslen, R. W. Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Maurice, Thomas. Indian Antiquities. London, 1793–1800. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Routledge, 1990. May, Georges. “Les mille et une nuits” d’Antoine Galland, ou le chef d’oeuvre invisible. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986. ———. “Schéhérazade et la paralittérature.” In Lettres et réalités: Mélanges de littérature générale et de critique romanesque offerts au professeur Henri Coulet par ses amis, 227–45. Aix-en-Provence, France: Université de Provence, 1988. Mayo, Robert Donald. The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815: With a Catalogue of 1375 Magazine Novels and Novelettes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962. McBurney, William H. “The Authorship of The Turkish Spy.” PMLA 72, no. 5 (1957): 915–35. McColley, Grant. “The Seventeenth-Century Doctrine of a Plurality of Worlds.” Annals of Science 1, no. 4 (1936): 385–430. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

318

Bibliogr aphy

———. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. McLeod, Bruce. The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. McMurran, Mary Helen. “National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel.” In The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel, edited by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, 50–72. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———. The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Cataract: A Study in Diderot. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979. Menocal, María Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Mervaud, Christiane. “La narration interrompue dans Le Sopha de Crébillon.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 249 (1987): 183–95. Metlitzki, Dorothee. The Matter of Araby in Medieval England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Miles, Robert. “Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Mediation.” In This Is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, 173–88. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Miller, James, and John Hoadly. Mahomet the Imposter: A Tragedy. London, 1744. Miller, Nancy K. French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995. Miller, Peter N. “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible.” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 463–82. Milton, John. A treatise on Christian doctrine compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone. Translated by Charles Richard Sumner. Cambridge, UK: J. Smith, 1825. Miquel, André. Un conte des “Mille et une nuits”: Ajîb et Gharîb (traduction et perspectives d’analyse). Paris: Flammarion, 1977. ———. “Naissance, éclipse et résurrection.” In Mille et un contes de la nuit, edited by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, Claude Bremond, and André Miquel. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. ———. Preface to Les mille et une nuits, xi–xlvi. Paris: Pléiade, 2005. ———. “The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society.” In “The Thousand and One Nights” in Arabic Literature and Society, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, 6–13. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by Robert Halsband. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. De l’esprit de loix. Geneva: Barrollot, 1748. ———. “Quelques reflexions sur Les lettres persanes.” In Lettres persanes. Cologne, France: Marteau, 1754. ———. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Nagel, 1955.

Bibliogr aphy

319

Moore, John Robert. “The Geography of Gulliver’s Travels.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 40 (1941): 214–28. Moréri, Louis. “Marana.” In Le grand dictionnaire historique, ou Le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane, edited by Claude-Pierre Goujet and François Drouet, 188–89. Paris: Les libraires associés, 1759. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1999. ———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Mortier, Roland, and Raymond Trousson, eds. Dictionnaire de Diderot. Paris: Champion, 1999. Morvan de Bellegarde, Jean Baptiste. Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale. Paris, 1702. Mottahedeh, Roy P. “ ‘Aja¯’ib in the Thousand and One Nights.” In “The Thousand and One Nights” in Arabic Literature and Society, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, 29–39. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mufti, Aamir R. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010): 458–93. Müller, Friedrich Max. “On the Migration of Fables.” In Chips from a German Workshop, 4:145–97. New York: Scribner, 1900. Narain, Mona. “Colonial Desires: The Fantasy of Empire and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.” Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 4 (2006): 585–98. Neill, Anna. British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002. Nerlich, Michael. Ideology of Adventure: Studies of Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750. Translated by Ruth Crowley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Newman, Gerald. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History. New York: St Martin’s, 1987. Niderst, Alain. “Vulgarisation scientifique et libertinage dans Les entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 14, no. 27 (1987): 485–93. Niklaus, Robert. “Fontenelle as a Model for the Transmission and Vulgarization of Ideas in the Enlightenment.” In Voltaire and His World: Studies Presented to W. H. Barber, edited by A. Mason, R. J. Howells, H. T. Mason, and D. Williams, 167–83. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985. North, Sir Thomas. Moral Philosophy of Doni [The Fables of Bidpai]. Edited by Donald Beecher, John Butler, and Carmine Di Biase. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2003 (orig. 1570). Novak, Maximillian E. “Crime and Punishment in Defoe’s Roxana.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65, no. 3 (1966): 445–65. ———. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “Some Notes toward a History of Fictional Forms: From Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 6, no. 2 (1973): 120–33.

320

Bibliogr aphy

———. “The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15 (1982): 85–102. Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Blacks So Called,’ 1688–1788.” In The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, 137–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———“Slavery, Blackness and Islam: The Arabian Nights in the Eighteenth Century.” In Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, edited by Brycchan Carey and Peter Kitson, 150–72. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2007. ———. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Orr, Bridget. “Galland, Georgian Theatre, and the Creation of Popular Orientalism.” In “The Arabian Nights” in Historical Context: Between East and West, edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, 103–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Patterson, Annabel. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Pavel, Thomas. “Fiction and Imitation.” Poetics Today 21, no. 3 (2000): 521–41. ———. “Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits.” New Literary History 34 (2003): 201–10. ———. “The Novel in Search of Itself.” In The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, edited by Franco Moretti, 3–31. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. La pensée du roman. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Pearson, Roger. The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s “Contes Philosophiques.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Perrin, Jean-François. “L’invention d’un genre littéraire au XVIIIe siècle: Le conte oriental.” Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux, XVIIe–XIXe siècle 2 (2004): 9–27. Pétis De La Croix, François. Les mille et un jours: contes persans. Paris: Ricoeur, 1710–12. ———. Turkish Tales. London: J. Tonson, 1708. Pierre, Gerald J. “Gulliver’s Voyage to China and Moor Park: The Influence of Sir William Temple upon Gulliver’s Travels.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17, no. 2 (1975): 427–37. Plato. The Republic. Translated by R. E. Allen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Poirson, Martial, ed. Art et argent en France au temps des premiers modernes (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004. Pomeau, René. “Note sur Zadig.” In Voltaire, Romans et contes, edited by René Pomeau. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966. Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope. Edited by James Sutherland and John Butt. London: Routledge, 1993. ———. The Guardian, May 21, 1713: 256–61. Popkin, Jeremy D. “The Mémoires secrets and the Reading of the Enlightenment.” In The “Mémoires secrets” and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century

Bibliogr aphy

321

France, edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort, 9–36. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998. Popkin, Richard H. Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Infl uence. New York: E. J. Brill, 1987. ———. “The Philosophical Basis of 18th-Century Racism.” In Racism in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Harold L. Pagliaro, 245–62. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973. Porter, David. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Prakash, Gyan. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Prévost, Abbé. Histoire d’une Grecque moderne. Edited by Alan J. Singerman. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. ———. History of a Modern Greek Woman. Translated by Lydia Davis. In The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Michel Feher, 543–717. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center, 1958. Pucci, Suzanne Rodin. “The Discrete Charms of the Exotic: Fictions of the Harem in Eighteenth-Century France.” In Exoticism in the Enlightenment, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, 145–74. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1990. Racine, Jean. Théâtre complet. Edited by Jacques Morel and Alain Viala. Paris: Garnier, 1980. Rajan, Balachandra. Review of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 by Srinivas Aravamudan. Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2001): 71–74. ———. Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Ramsey, Rachel. “China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s An Historical Essay . . . ” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 483–503. Rawson, Claude. God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Real, H. J., and H. J. Vienken. “Gulliver and Mandeville.” Notes and Queries 30, no. 6 (1983): 512. Reeve, Clara. The Progress of Romance. Colchester, UK: W. Keymer, 1785. Rejeb, Lotfi Ben. “Observing the Birth of a Nation: The Oriental Spy Genre and Nation Making in Early American Literature.” In The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, edited by Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson, 253–89. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2002. Rendall, Steven F. “Fontenelle and His Public.” MLN 86, no. 4 (1971): 496–508. Revel, Jacques. “The Uses of Comparison: Religions in the Eighteenth Century.” In Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, edited by Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, 331–47. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010.

322

Bibliogr aphy

Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady. Edited by Angus Ross. London: Penguin, 2004. ———. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Edited by T. C. Duncan and Ben D. Kimpel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Richetti, John. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti, 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700–1739. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Richman, Paula, ed. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of Narrative Traditions in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Rogers, Pat. Introduction to George Lyttelton, The Persian Letters: Being Letters of a Persian in England to his Friend in Ispahan. Edited by Roderick Boyd Porter. Cleveland: Rowbant Club, 1988. Rousseau, G. S., and Roy Porter, eds. Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. ———. “Introduction: Approaching Enlightenment Exoticism.” In Exoticism in the Enlightenment, edited by Rousseau and Porter, 4–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Rousseau, Nicolas. Diderot: L’écriture romanesque à l’épreuve du sensible. Paris: Champion, 1997. Runyon, Randolph Paul. The Art of the “Persian Letters”: Unlocking Montesquieu’s Secret Chain. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Russell, G. A. “The Impact of the Philosophus autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke, and the Society of Friends.” In The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Russell, 224–65. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. ———. “Introduction: The Seventeenth Century: The Age of ‘Arabick.’ “ In The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Russell, 1–19. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Sade, Marquis de. Oeuvres. Edited by Michel Delon. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. ———. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel. Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1994. Saint-Foix, Germain-François Poullain de. Lettres d’une Turque à Paris. Amsterdam, 1730. Sallis, Eva. Sheherazade through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of “The Thousand and One Nights.” Richmond, VA: Curzon, 1999. Salmon, Vivian. “Arabists and Linguists in Seventeenth-Century England.” In The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by G. A. Russell, 54–69. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Salzman, Paul. English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Schlegel, Friedrich. “Athenaeum Fragment #116.” In German Aesthetic and Literary

Bibliogr aphy

323

Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, edited by Kathleen Wheeler, 78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos, 2006. Schnell, Lisa J. “Parenthetical Disturbances: Aphra Behn and the Rhetoric of Relativity.” Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 12, nos. 1–2 (1992): 95–113. Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Translated by Gene Patterson Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Scudéry, Madeleine de. Ibrahim, ou L’illustre bassa. Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1641. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Sgard, Jean. “Un genre singulier.” In Prévost et le récit bref, edited by Jan Hermans and Paul Pelckmans, 11–21. New York: Rodopi, 2006. ———. Introduction to Le sopha, conte moral. In vol. 2 of Claude Crébillon, Œuvres complètes, edited by Sgard, 251–88. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2000. Shaw, Sheila. “The Rape of Gulliver: Case Study of a Source.” PMLA 90, no. 1 (1975): 62–68. Sheldon, Esther K. Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, 1719–1788. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Sheridan, Frances. “The History of Nourjahad.” In Three Oriental Tales, edited by Alan Richardson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Shimi, S. F. “Portrait d’un espion du XVIIIe siècle.” Les lettres romanes 35, no. 1–2 (1981): 129–43. Shklar, Judith N. Montesquieu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. “Politics and the Intellect.” In Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers, edited by Stanley Hoffmann, 94–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Shloss, Carol Loeb. “ ‘Behind the Veil’: James Joyce and the Colonial Harem.” James Joyce Quarterly 35, nos. 2–3 (1998): 333–47. Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy). Edited by R. W. Maslen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Sill, Geoffrey. “The Source of Robinson Crusoe’s ‘Sudden Joys.’ “ Notes and Queries 45, no. 1 (1998): 67–68. Sironval, Margaret. “Métamorphoses d’un conte: Aladin Français et Anglais.” Ph.D diss., University of Paris III, 1998. Siskin, Clifford. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700– 1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner. “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument.” In This Is Enlightenment, edited by Siskin and Warner, 1–33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Skinner, John. Constructions of Smollett: A Study of Genre and Gender. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. Smith, Peter Lester. “New Light on the Publication of Micromégas.” Modern Philology 73, no. 1 (1975): 77–80.

324

Bibliogr aphy

Smollett, Tobias George. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. London: T. Johnson, 1753. ———. The History and Adventures of an Atom. Edited by Robert Adams Day. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Spedding , Patrick. “Shameless Scribbler or Votary of Virtue? Eliza Haywood, Writing (and) Pornography in 1742.” In Women Writing 1550–1750, edited by Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, 237–51 (La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 1). La Trobe, Australia: Meridian, 2001. Spengemann, William C. “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (1984): 384–414. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Stewart, Philip. “The Rise of I.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13, no. 2–3 (2001): 163–81. ———. “Le roman à clefs à l’époque des Lumières.” In Les dérèglements de l’art: Formes et procédures de l’illégitimité culturelle en France, 1715–1914, edited by Pierre Popovic and Erik Vigneault, 183–95. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2000. Stoler, Ann. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sutton, Geoffrey V. Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Sutton, John L., Jr. “The Source of Mrs. Manley’s Preface to Queen Zarah.” Modern Philology 82, no. 2 (1984): 167–72. [Swift, Jonathan]. An Account of the Court and Empire of Japan. In Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces Fragments and Marginalia, edited by Herbert Davis, 99–107. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. In The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, edited by Herbert Davis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1959. ———. Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces Fragments and Marginalia. Edited by Herbert Davis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Tacquet, Andreas. Opera Mathematica. Antwerp, Belgium: Jacobus Meursius, 1669. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2007. Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Temple, William. Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple. Edited by Samuel Holt Monk. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963. ———. Of Heroic Virtue. London, 1678. Terrasse, Jean. Le temps et l’espace dans les romans de Diderot. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999. Thompson, G. R. “Interdisciplinarity and Romantic Narrative: Analogues of the Visual

Bibliogr aphy

325

Arts in the Literature of the Grotesque, Gothic, and Arabesque.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 49 (2001): 101–20. Thorel-Cailleteau, Sylvie. “The Poetry of Mediocrity.” In The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, edited by Franco Moretti, 64–94. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Thorn, Jennifer. “The Work of Writing Race: Galland, Burton, and The Arabian Nights.” In Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment, edited by Laura J. Rosenthal and Mita Chowdhury, 151–69. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. ———, ed. Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722–1859. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003. Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. London: André Deutsch, 1996. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. ———. “Les hommes-récits.” In Poétique de la prose, 78–91. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971. ———. “Narrative Men.” In The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard, 66–79. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. ———. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. “Réflexions sur les Lettres persanes.” Romanic Review 74, no. 3 (1983): 306–15. Torchiana, Donald T. Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986. Tucker, Joseph E. “On the Authorship of The Turkish Spy: An ‘état présent.’ “ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 52 (1958): 34–57. ———. “The Turkish Spy and Its French Background.” Revue de littérature comparée 32 (1958): 74–91. van den Heuvel, Jacques. Voltaire dans ses contes: De “Micromégas” à “L’ingénu.” Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1967. Van Roosbroeck, G. L. “Persian Letters” before Montesquieu. New York: Publications of the Institute for French Studies, 1932. van Ruymbeke, C. Postscript to Ramsay Wood, Kalila and Dimna: Fables of Friendship and Betrayal, 299–301. London: Saqi Books, 2008. Vartanian, Aram. “Eroticism and Politics in the Lettres persanes.” Romanic Review 60, no. 1 (1969): 23–33. ———. “The Politics of Les Bijoux indiscrets.” In Enlightenment Studies in Honour of L. G. Crocker, edited by Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio, 349–76. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979. Vázquez, Lydia. “Le Sopha et ses conséquences: Succès d’une esthétique de l’intimisme.” In Songe, illusion, égarement dans les romans de Crébillon, edited by Jean Sgard, 79–92. Grenoble, France: Éditions littéraires et linguistiques de l’Université de Grenoble, 1996. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

326

Bibliogr aphy

Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Voltaire. Babouc; or the world as it goes. By Monsieur de Voltaire. To which are added, letters concerning his disgrace at the Prussian Court: With his letter to his Niece on that Occasion. Also, The force of friendship, or, innocence distress’d. A novel. London: Printed for W. Owen, 1754. ———. Dictionnaire philosophique. Paris: Garnier, 1967 (orig. 1764). ———. Micromegas: A Comic Romance. Being a Severe Satire upon the Philosophy, Ignorance, and Self-Conceit of Mankind. Together with A Detail of the Crusades: And a new Plan for the History of the Human Mind. London: Printed for D. Wilson and T. Durham, 1753. ———. Romans et contes. Edited by René Pomeau. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966 ———. The white bull, an oriental history. From an ancient Syrian manuscript, communicated by Mr. Voltaire. Cum notis editoris et variorum . . . The whole faithfully done into English. London: Printed for J. Bew, 1774. Wade, Ira O. Voltaire’s “Micromégas”: A Study in the Fusion of Science, Myth, and Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950. Walpole, Horace. Letter from Xo Ho: A Chinese Philosopher at London to His Friend Lien Chi at Peking. London, 1757. Walsh, Jonathan. Abbé Prévost’s “Histoire d’une Grecque moderne”: Figures of Authority on Trial. Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2001. ———. “Real and Symbolic Exchange in Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne.” French Review 74, no. 1 (2000): 94–105. Walton, Brian. Biblia sacra polyglotta. London: Roycroft, 1657. Wang, An-chi. “Gulliver’s Travels” and Ching-hua yuan Revisited: A Menippean Approach. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Warner, William Beatty. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Warren, Donald. “The Turkish Spy.” Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1983. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Watt, James. “Goldsmith’s Cosmopolitanism.” Eighteenth-Century Life 30, no. 1 (2005): 56–75. Webb, John. An Historical Essay Endeavoring A Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language. London: Brook, 1669. Weitzman, Arthur J. “The Oriental Tale in the Eighteenth Century: A Reconsideration.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1839–55. Whicher, George Frisbie. The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood. New York: Columbia University Press, 1915. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. ———. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Wilkins, John. The Discovery of a World in the Moone. Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1973 (orig. 1638).

Bibliogr aphy

327

Williams, Glyn. The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage around the World. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Williams, Gwyn A. “Prince Madoc and the Turkish Spy.” Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 1982. Williams, Harold. The Text of “Gulliver’s Travels.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Williams, Ioan. The Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: A Documentary Record. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. Williams, Kathleen. Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1967. Wilputte, Earla A. “The Textual Architecture of Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai.” Essays in Literature 22 (1995): 31–44. Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Wolff, Christian. Elementa matheseos universae. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 1968. Wood, Ramsay. Kalila and Dimna: Fables of Friendship and Betrayal. London: Saqi Books, 2008. Yadav, Alok. Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Yamanaka, Yuriko, and Tetsuo Nishi, eds. The “Arabian Nights” and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West. London: Tauris, 2006. Yang, Chi-ming. “Gross Metempsychosis and the Eastern Soul.” In Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, edited by Frank Palmeri, 13–30. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Yared, Aida. “Joyce’s Sources: Sir Richard F. Burton’s ‘Terminal Essay’ in Finnegans Wake.” Joyce Studies Annual 11 (2000): 124–66. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Young, David B. “Libertarian Demography: Montesquieu’s Essay on Depopulation in the Lettres persanes.” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 4 (1975): 669–82. Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition. London, 1759. ———. Night Thoughts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 (orig. 1742). Zionkowski, Linda, and Cynthia Klekar, eds. The Culture of the Gift in EighteenthCentury England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. ———. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Index

Abbott, Nadia, 51 Adams, William, 216–17 Adorno, Theodor, 2 adventure chronotope. See chronotopes Adventures of Eovaai (Haywood), 202, 215, 217–30; allegorical identifications in, 294n46; as alternative to realist novel, 219, 225, 228, 230; as anthropological parody, 223; Chinese influences on, 222; as satire, 226, 295n58; as scandal chronicle and oriental romance, 218 Aesop, 130, 132, 147, 279n44 Aladdin, 17, 22, 66, 143, 208 Alf layla wa-layla. See Arabian Nights, The Algarotti, Francesco, 276n11 Ali Baba, 17, 66, 143, 249 allegory, 27, 29, 81, 90, 134, 186, 204, 210, 216, 228, 239–40, 251, 281n78; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 212; in History of Nourjahad (Sheridan), 231; in Manley, 209–10; and sexuality in The Skimmer (Crébillon), 162. See also transcultural allegory Anderson, Perry, 78 Andrea, Bernadette, 257n24 Anglicanism, 205 animals: moral superiority of, 146; in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 145–50; in Zadig (Voltaire), 158. See also beast fable; theriophily Anson, George, 97–99; Voyage Round the World, 97 anthropocentrism: alternatives to, 147, 150; critique of, 116, 118, 125, 143

aphanisis, 171–72 App, Urs, 11 Arabian Nights, The, 11–12, 21–22, 50–58, 75–76; and Adventures of Eovaai (Haywood), 218, 226; allusions to in Joyce, 252; as anthropology, 54; in Diderot, 187, 199; in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 69, 73; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 51, 55; formal dimensions of, 56, 72; in French literary history, 70; and genre, 29, 54, 264n36, 268n81; influence of, 19, 55, 69, 155, 253; literary identity of, 53–54; origins of, 51, 54; plural cultural traditions in, 186; and print culture, 52–53; publication of in England, 69; and realism, 71; and Sheridan, 232; and similarities with Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 143, 281n77; structure of, 35, 167, 181, 219; and transculturation, 40–41, 51; and transformation of passion into action, 224–25; translation of, 17, 217–18 Arabian Nights Entertainment. See Arabian Nights, The Arabic language, 15, 16–17, 53–54, 71, 143, 268n81 Argental, Marquis d’ (Charles de Ferriol), 165–66; fictional incorporation of, 173 Aristotle, 38–39, 153, 231; and cosmogony, 115, 117; and political theory, 83, 160; and reality, 259n56 Armstrong, Nancy, 24 Auerbach, Erich, 18, 231 Augustine, Saint, 115, 167

329

330

Index

Austen, Jane, 25, 202 Australia, 118, 122, 142–43, 225 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 33–35, 36, 38, 58, 64, 68, 74–75, 91, 237–39; and chronotope, 35, 237; The Dialogic Imagination, 33; and essence of realism, 62; and generic dialogism, 54; and literary time, 58; and the novel, 33–36, 240 Ballaster, Ros, 96, 266n60 Bayle, Pierre, 3, 15, 44, 93, 144 Beasley, Jerry C., 218 beast fable, 118, 129–41, 146, 147, 150, 155, 278n29, 278n34; in English Civil War, 134; as imported and autochthonous, 134; as opposite of cosmological realism, 129; and state formation, 147. See also fable Beattie, James, 70, 138, 143 Beckford, William, 5, 6, 100 Behn, Aphra, 35, 40, 62, 68, 76, 84; and antinovelistic discourse, 266n60; as Astrea, 212; The Emperor of the Moon, 117; “Essay on Translated Prose,” 127–29; Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, 207; Oroonoko, 19, 58–62, 127–28, 141, 207–8; probability and truth in, 208; and reading of Fontenelle, 127; and scandal fiction, 207, 228; as spy, 40, 58–60, 266n54; and spy fiction, 29, 43; as translator, 61; Turkish themes in, 59; The Younger Brother, or The Amorous Jilt, 266n54 ben Daoud, Soliman, 219–20 Benjamin, Walter, 29, 75, 183, 244–49; and boredom, 244–45; and distinction between chronicler and storyteller, 247; and oriental tale, 248; and story as parable, 246–47; “The Storyteller,” 244–49; and subjective experience, 244–45 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric, 154, 158, 161 Bhatta, Somadeva, 129, 278n29; The Ocean of Story, 129, 278n29 Bibliothèque orientale (D’Herbelot), 50, 51, 54, 219–20 bijoux indiscrets, Les (Diderot), 165, 187–201; and narrative, 193–94; and objectification, 196–98; as oriental tale, 195; repudiation of by Diderot, 200; sexual surveillance in, 187–91 bildungsroman, 1, 36, 237–38

Bloch, Howard, 147 Bodin, Jean, 92 Booth, Wayne, 98 boredom, 150, 177–79, 181, 184, 191, 244–45, 298n2 Bougainville, Antoine, 118, 142 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 3 Bowers, Toni, 62, 213 Boyle, Frank, 145 Boyle, Robert, 141 Brémond, Gabriel de, 205; Hattigé, ou les amours du roi de Tamaran, 205–7, 209–10, 213 Brown, Homer Obed, 258n46 Bulstrode, Whitelocke, 186 Burke, Edmund, 6, and impeachment of Hastings, 103, 109, 275n51 Burton, Jonathan, 12 Bussy-Rabutin, Roger de, 207; Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, 207, 240 Byatt, A. S., 26 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 56, 140 Caracciolo, Peter, 268n82 Carleton, Mary, 67 Cartesianism, 48, 117, 119, 146, 149, 277n26; in Fontenelle, 151 cartography, 141 Casanova, Giacomo, 181 Casanova, Pascale, 18 Catholicism, 44, 115, 147, 161–62, 205 Cavendish, Margaret, 117 Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde (Picart), 126, 154, 158, 173; and ethnography of religion, 161 Cervantes, Miguel de, 17, 50; Don Quixote, 17, 50, 58, 140, 248 Chambers, William, 223 character-function (Propp), 235–36 Chardin, Jean, 88 Charles II, 59, 60, 65, 205–6; and libertinism, 207; and polygamy, 210 Charron, Pierre, 145 Chatterjee, Partha, 63–64 Cheek, Pamela, 191, 289n54 China, 12–14, 76, 93, 97–100, 122, 145, 221; as allegorical equivalent of France, 241; in English imagination, 215; European knowledge of, 142; superiority of, 144

Index Chinese: Orientalist representations of, 97, 213; as source for Houyhnhnm, 145 Chinese language, 13 chinoiserie, 100; and British popular taste, 222; hybrid aesthetics of, 223 Christianity, 3, 11, 13, 63, 103–4, 126, 162, 176 chronique scandaleuse. See scandal chronicle chronotope, 26, 35–36, 59, 75, 237–39, 251 265n47; reversibility with xenotrope, 231; as translated through narrative, 234 Churchill, Sarah. See Marlborough, Duchess of circulation narratives. See it-narratives civil law, 92–94 Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (Richardson), 19, 139–40, 165, 185; as oriental tale, 175–76 classicism: comparative, 106; Egyptian and Greek, 155; and literature, 73; and Orientalism, 18, 105, 213; transcultural, 203 Cleveland, Duchess of (Barbara Palmer), 206 Coetzee, J. M., 69 Coleridge, Samuel, 22 colonialism, 11, 101, 109, 208, 274n44; in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 142–43 Congreve, William, 26, 35 conte philosophique, 138–39; and Voltaire, 150–59 Cook, Captain, 118, 142 Copernicus, 116 cosmogony, 115, 119; and Copernicus, 116; and cross-cultural knowledge, 124–26 cosmological realism, 118, 141; and counterintuitive knowledge, 126–27; and Fontenelle, 122, 157, 202; as mode of Enlightenment Orientalism, 129, 146. See also realism cosmology, 115; and Christianity, 116, 128; and Fontenellian skepticism, 119; and relativism, 123; and verisimilitude, 125 cosmopolitanism, 4, 6, 7, 14, 44, 81, 99–100; and literature, 18, 74; premodern, 228; and women writers, 62 Costa Lima, Luiz, 22–24 Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de, 29, 125, 176, 196, 201, 222; Ah! Quel conte, 183; Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofi rans, 184; Les égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, 180; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 177, 194; and metempsy-

331

chosis, 186; and scandal fiction, 184; The Skimmer, or The History of Tanzaï et Néadarné, 162–64, 184, 222; Le Sopha, 165, 176–87, 240 Creech, James, 193, 199 cultural relativism, 41, 82, 102, 109, 118, 123, 126; and incest taboo, 88; and moral evaluation, 160 Cusset, Catherine, 167 Decameron, The (Boccaccio), 140, 226 de Certeau, Michel, 278n34 defamiliarization, 41, 54, 79, 100, 125, 127– 28, 154, 264n36; and cosmological realism, 146; and cultural self-knowledge, 164–65; in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 143, 146, 148; and Oriental traveler, 273n44; and scandal chronicle, 202 Defoe, Daniel; 40, 63–64, 68, 198, 202, 211; and Anglophone realist novel, 182; Captain Singleton, 64; Colonel Jack, 64; Continuation of the Letters of a Turkish Spy, 62–63, 267n62; Moll Flanders, 64, 164; and populism of realist fiction, 227; Robinson Crusoe, 15–16, 57, 69, 141, 248; Roxana, 64–68, 164; Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, 64; and spy fiction, 29, 43 deictic shift theory, 297n78 deism, 3, 5, 44, 144; Voltaire and, 158 De l’esprit des lois (Montesquieu), 77–78, 82, 89–90, 93, 126; as Orientalism, 270n12 Delon, Michel, 125 Derrida, Jacques, 147 Descartes, René, 48, 153; and vorticism, 117, 124. See also Cartesianism Description of a New World, The (Cavendish), 117 despotism, 84, 92, 105, 157, 177, 182, 217, 226–27, 236–38; and despot as literary type, 181, 188, 201; and enlightenment, 205; in Montesquieu, 81–84, 89, 160, 270n13, 270n15 desubjectivation, 57–58, 62, 67, 191, 195–96, 198, 266n54; and objectification, 195 D’Herbelot, Barthélemy, 50–51, 54, 223; Bibliothèque orientale, 50–51, 54, 219–20 diable boiteux, Le (Le Sage), 17, 240 dialogue (genre), 118–26, 154, 181, 183, 193 dialogism. See Bakhtin

332

Index

didacticism, 36, 57, 75; moral, 26, 129, 139, 164, 225; in stories, 137, 140, 236, 245–46 Diderot, Denis, 3, 5, 29, 125, 187, 296, 202; and anthropology, 199; Les bijoux indiscrets, 165, 187–201; and Enlightenment sexual discourse, 193; Jacques le fataliste, 55; La religieuse, 194–96, 290n65; Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 193; as translator, 165, 198 Dirks, Nicholas, 109 Discovery of New Worlds, A (Fontenelle). See Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Fontenelle) dissertative function (White), 231, 235–37; and national realism, 238 Dobie, Madeleine, 53, 185, 193 Dodsley, Robert, 139 domestic realism, 6–7, 20–21, 28, 34, 39, 62, 70, 160, 164, 176, 204, 238–39; and The Arabian Nights, 70; and foreign fantasy, 65, 244; and reversibility with Orientalism, 231, 238 Doody, Margaret, 37, 261n4 Du Halde, J.-B., 222 Du Plaisir, Sieur, 26, 165 East. See Orient East India Company, 102–3, 109 Écumoire, L’ (Crébillon). See Skimmer, The (Crébillon) empiricism, 15–16, 18, 61, 141, 151, 195; and abandonment of sense perception, 191; in Les bijoux indiscrets, 189; and dispute with rationalism, 132; renunciation of, 198; scientific, 75; and sexuality, 187–88, 199; and subjectivity, 194 Enlightenment, 2, 3, 10, 170; and anthropocentric science, 147; and communication, 4; critiques of, 2; and culture, 17, 200, 203; and despotism, 205; and postcolonialism, 4; and post-Enlightenment period, 8; as radical period, 3, 15; and religion, 160–61; and sexuality, 191; as social-scientific function of Orientalism, 182; utopian aspirations of, 3 Enlightenment Orientalism, 6–10, 18, 44, 48, 75, 79, 253; and allegory, 59, 212, 217; comparative method of, 13, 110, 213; and comparative religion, 154; conjectural intervention and reflection, 125, 159; as

cosmopolitanism, 99; as critique, 10; and cross-cultural judgment, 111, 243; cultural referents of, 15, 99–100; and defamiliarization, 136, 154; defi nition of, 4; as fable, 129–30, 139–40; as fiction, 4, 8, 10, 12, 35, 65; and genre, 34, 101, 109, 118, 164; and heteroglossia, 68; and hybrid subjectivity, 167; and it-narratives, 197; and justice, 80; and libertinism, 8, 163; modernizing nature of, 138; and national realism, 242; and the novel, 4–5, 8, 204; objectification and desubjectivation in, 195–96; and Orientalism, 169, 256n17; philosophical limit of, 172; political outcomes of, 100; popular success of, 176; practitioners of, 5; and rise of nations, 33; and royal slave in Oroonoko (Behn), 207; as satire, 96, 156; in scientific dialogue and beast fable, 129; in seventeenth century, 13–14, 205; and sexuality, 129, 195, 200; and spy fiction, 40; and stereotypes, 96, 193; in Swift, 150; and theory of multiple worlds, 116; as transcultural allegory, 202; and transculturation, 8, 74, 228–29; as universalism, 203; utopia and, 7, 145; and women writers, 106. See also Enlightenment; Orientalism Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Fontenelle), 61, 118–29; cosmogony of, 119; editions and translations of, 127, 276n5 epic, 18, 24, 25, 34, 35, 72, 90, 116, 138–39, 245, 247, 268n81; and early literacy, 299n4 epistemology, 128, 134, 146, 162, 165, 178; Orientalism as, 12; of polygamy, 93; and relativism in The Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 76; of sex, 191, 199 epistolary fiction, 49, 76, 77, 86, 102; and literary forms, 90 espion turc, L’ (Marana). See Turkish Spy, The (Marana) ethnography, 141, 145, 182, 270n6; and comparative religion, 161; critical, 182; and Marana in New Atalantis (Manley), 212; and observation, 49, 78; reverse, 108; and time, 63 Europe, 7, 11–12; and blind interface with Asia, 217; identity of in early modern

Index period, 22; and interactions with nonEurope, 200; and interest in Near East, 11; literature in, 18, 203; and production of Orient, 2 exoticism, 5, 176; and domestic realism, 239; and it-narratives, 197 extraterrestrials: and racializing stereotypes, 123–24; and scientific speculation, 122–23, 128 Fabian, Johannes, 9, 63 fable: as allegory, 134, 137; and debunking of religion, 162; and eighteenth-century novel, 280n62; and hermeneutics, 135; and importation into England, 279n44; inaccuracy of, 177; and moralism, 139; multiple functions of, 133; and narrative, 137, 140; political applications of, 138; as transcultural, 150. See beast fable Fables of Bidpai, 27, 55, 106, 118, 129–38; European precursors of, 278n34; narrative and structure of, 132, 238; translations of, 134 Fables of Pilpay. See Fables of Bidpai fantasy: in Aristotle, 259n56; in European literature, 73, 75, 244; as fictional genre, 24–25, 27; as healthy, 27; and Orientalism, 191, 197, 217; and parody of theology, 220; in Voltaire, 153 femininity: and ethics, 86, 176; and furniture, 185; and scientific rationality, 125, 127 feminism, 48, 64, 66, 71, 128, 193, 195, 211, 245 Fénelon, François, 43; Les aventures de Télémaque, 27, 135; as precursor to New Atalantis (Manley), 212 Ferriol, Charles de. See Argental, Marquis d’ fiction: as affiliative and translational mode, 253; anti-Walpole, 218; birth of, 16–17, 19–21, 37; and colonial relation, 101; and cross-cultural juxtaposition, 84, 162; and cultural geography, 39, 74; as cultural translation, 75; Enlightenment mode of, 72; and fantasy, 152–53, 225; and harems, 59, 79, 82; history and theory of, 30; and idealism, 28; lunar voyage in, 117; mimetic forms of, 38; and moral emulation, 168; and the nation, 36, 68, 74, 204, 217; non-European origins of, 38; and

333

the novel, 25, 209; and Orientalism in eighteenth century, 126; and political philosophy, 89; and print culture, 248; and realism, 19, 25, 39; and subjectivity, 164; and transcultural transcending of reality, 243; and truth, 40 fidelity, 80, 86, 199 Fielding, Henry, 25, 28, 35, 202, 266n60; and antirealist metaphor, 229; and comic burlesque, 154; Joseph Andrews, 154, 165, 212; Tom Jones, 96, 165, 228–29; The Tragedy of Tragedies, 223 Flint, Christopher, 196–97 Foigny, Gabriel de, 118, 143 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bouyer de, 3, 118–29; 148, 150, 161, 202; cosmogony of, 119; and cosmological realism, 122, 141; De l’origine des fables, 154, 161; editions and translations of, 127, 276n5; as Enlightenment feminist, 277n27; Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 61, 118–29; Histoire des oracles, 126; as inventor of conversational model, 276n11; life and career, 119, 276n10; Nouveaux dialogues des morts, 277n22; and pastoral, 276n13; and plurality of worlds theory, 16, 64, 118; as precursor to New Atalantis (Manley); satire of in Voltaire, 151, 153–54, 283n103; and scientific dialogue, 128 footnotes: in Adventures of Eovaai (Haywood), 223–24; and epistemology, 227; as ethnographic, 106, 225; as parodic markers, 99, 223, 228 Fortunate Mistress, The. See Roxana (Defoe) Foucault, Michel, 40, 119; and critique of Enlightenment, 2; and Diderot, 192; History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 160; on knowledge and pleasure, 191; and sexuality, 180, 189, 289n61 frame tale, 129, 132, 135, 181, 278n29; of The Arabian Nights, 53, 55–56, 177, 179 Frankfurt School, 2 French Revolution, 9, 100, 102, 106, 274n46 Fudge, Erica, 146 furniture, 99, 185–86, 222 Gallagher, Catherine, 19–20, 23–24, 62, 209, 258n45; and novelistic character, 259n49

334

Index

Galland, Antoine, 11–12, 50–51, 53, 57, 70; correspondence with Huet, 72; and genre system, 239; and history of the East, 220–21; as influence on Adventures of Eovaai (Haywood), 222; and invention of Aladdin and Ali Baba stories, 143–44, 249; and pseudoethnography, 77, 223; seventeenth-century style of, 264n36; and Sindbad cycle of tales, 265n46; as transcreator, 54; and translation of The Arabian Nights, 17, 35, 40–41, 70, 252, 278n34 Gallop, Jane, 189 Gaultier, Abbé, 78 gender: and critique, 296n67; and scientific knowledge, 127–28; and utopianism, 170 genre: affiliative and constitutive accounts of, 249; in Arab poetry, 53; egalitarianism, 72; fiction and, 20; and generic reversibility, 231; and modernity theory, 253; and the novel, 20, 34 George II, 240, 242 Gerhardt, Mia, 265n41 Ghazoul, Ferial Jabouri, 56 Gibbes, Phebe, 274n46 Gibbon, Edward, 3; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3, 105 gift: acceptance of and submission to, 57–58, 171; freedom as, 169; and symbolic violence, 170 Golden Ass, The (Apuleius), 38, 41, 179 Goldsmith, Oliver, 76, 97, 102, 239–40; Citizen of the World, 49, 80, 97–101; and cosmopolitanism, 100; depiction of China, 97–100; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 99; and pseudoethnography, 29 Goodfellow, Sarah, 128 Goodman, Dena, 80 Goody, Jack, 299n4 gothic (genre), 1, 25, 95, 231, 236 Goulemot, Jean-Marie, 189, 224 Gracián, Baltasar, 15, 49 Grosrichard, Alain, 77, 81 Gueullette, Thomas, 27; Mughal Tales, 27; Thousand and One Quarters-of-anHour: Tartarian Tales, 55 Guillory, John, 4 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 118, 129, 140–50, 215–18, 225; and colonialism, 141–43; and interspecies encounter, 146; Japanese allusions in, 216; as parody,

142; and political philosophy, 147; and similarities with The Arabian Nights, 281n77; as transcultural allegory, 228 gynocentrism, 62, 195, 266n60 Hamilton, Antoine (Anthony), 5, 51, 55, 220; Histoire de Fleur d’Épine, 55, 220; Les quatre facardins, 55, 220 Hamilton, Charles, 102, 273n44; and work of Elizabeth Hamilton, 273n41 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 29, 102, 104, 108; authorial impact, 274n46; and British approach to India, 273n44; and British imperial ideology, 275n52; on Hinduism and Islam, 105–6; and homage to Charles Hamilton, 273n41; Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 49, 80, 102–5, 108–09 harem, 59, 79, 94, 143, 167, 171, 207, 232; and claustrophobic referentiality, 215; and the French court, 270n15; as phantasmatic site, 83; as political allegory, 81–86; and power, 84–86; and sexuality, 87–88; social structures of, 85; and surveillance, 83–86; symbolic structures of, 85–86; themes of revenge and jealousy, 206, 271n16 harem fiction, 59, 79, 81; and Histoire d’une Grècque moderne (Prévost), 165; metaphor and analogy in, 91; as political allegory, 82, 86; and singularity, 90 Harootunian, Harry, 239 Harris, Joseph, 133, 136–37 Hastings, Warren, 102–3, 109 Hatchett, William, 165, 177, 181, 222 Hattigé, ou les amours du roi de Tamaran (Brémond), 205–7, 209–10, 213 Hawkesworth, John, 24, 71, 142, 227 Haywood, Eliza, 202, 215, 217–31, 239–40; Adventures of Eovaai, 202, 215, 217–30; and antinovelistic discourse, 266n60; and antirealist metaphor, 229; and fantasy, 75; hermeneutics of, 229; The Invisible Spy, 45; Letters from the Palace of Fame (Haywood), 222; Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 226; Oriental anthropology and fiction in, 223–24; and political allegory, 242; and postrealist hermeneutics, 230; and pre-Adamites, 222; reflections on monarchy, 227; and satire,

Index 29, 243; sinophilia and licentiousness, 222–23; and spy fiction, 43; as translator, 165, 177; and verisimilitude, 225 Hazard, Paul, 5, 205 hedonism: European desire for, 205; in Haywood, 230; in History of Nourjahad (Sheridan), 232, 236, 238; as Orientalized, 185 Hellman, Mimi, 185 Herodotus, 183, 246 heteroglossia, 33–35, 68 heterosexuality: and polygamy, 85; as social and political principle, 174, 213 Hinduism, 5, 11, 103–08, 122, 186, 274n46, 274n49, 275n50 Histoire d’une Grècque moderne (Prévost), 165–76; as Augustinian novel, 167; and sexuality, 168 History and Adventures of an Atom, The (Smollett), 239–43; allegory and satire in, 240; and engagement with contemporary reality, 243; as scatological Orientalism, 243 History of Nourjahad (Sheridan), 138, 231–39; as bildungsroman, 237; cross-gendered identification in, 296n67; hedonism in, 232; moral absolutism and emotional authenticity in, 234–35; and similarities with “Araby” (Joyce), 250; textual history of, 231–32 Hobbes, Thomas, 92, 147; and absolutist monarchy, 226; and Leviathan, 150; and state of nature, 89; and Troglodytes, 272n26 Hodges, William, 106 Hogarth, William, 185 Hole, Richard, 73–74; Remarks on the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 73–74 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 110 Homer, 73, 116; Odyssey, 74, 116, 251 Horkheimer, Max, 2 Houyhnhnms, 144–50; idealization of, 150; ontology of, 148; and politics, 149 Huet, Pierre Daniel, 36–40, 59, 72, 249; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 37; and fiction, 21, 28, 38–39, 122, 261n11; and Orientals, 11; on religion, 13; and le roman, 37; Traité de l’origine des Romans, 36–39 Hume, David, 161; Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 154

335

Humphreys, Samuel, 27 Hunter, J. Paul, 36, 268n87 Huntington, Samuel, 9 Huygens, Christiaan, 15, 277n18; on animals, 277n17; Cosmotheros, 117 Hyde, Thomas, 88 hypotyposis, 224, 295n56 ibn Tufayl, 15–16; Hayy bin Yaqzan, 15–17, 136 idealism, 18, 28, 141, 237; cosmopolitanism as, 100; and naturalism, 180 incest, 88, 207, 213, 286n19; and libertine writers, 181 India, 12–13, 14, 76, 147, 158, 177, 278n29; Orientalist knowledge of, 102–07, 273n41, 273n44, 275n51 international law, 93, 271n23 Ireland, 97, 143, 249–50, 252 Irwin, Robert, 11–12, 257n21 Islam, 2–3, 63, 105, 232; eighteenth-century attacks on, 162; as religious imposture, 236, 273n41 Israel, Jonathan, 3 it-narratives, 29, 196–99, 240; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 197; philosophical implications of, 198 Jacobs, Joseph, 130 James, Henry, 56; and Anglophone realist novel, 182 Jansenism, 90, 168; and morality, 155, 166–67 Japan: allegorical allusions to in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift); as allegorical rendition of Britain and England, 240; in English imagination, 215; European knowledge of, 142 Jesuits, 13, 93, 97, 99, 144, 222 Johnson, Samuel, 5–6, 22, 144; Lives of the Poets, 96; Rasselas, 238 Jones, Ernest, 171 Joyce, James, 29, 249–53; allusions to The Arabian Nights, 252; and Anglophone realist novel, 29, 182; “Araby,” 250; Dubliners, 250, 252; Finnegans Wake, 252; and modernism, 249; Ulysses, 250–52 justice, 80, 92, 94; as ideal of oriental tale, 91; and public right, 92; satire of in Le monde comme il va (Voltaire), 155; as transcultural, 94

336

Index

Kaempfer, Engelbert, 216 Kalila wa Dimna, 29, 55, 129–30, 147; Arabic tradition of, 51; as precursor to History of Nourjahad (Sheridan), 231 Kamuf, Peggy, 261n11 Kant, Immanuel, 1–2 Kaul, Suvir, 140 Kavanagh, Thomas, 199 Kelly, Gary, 274n46 Kietzman, Mary Jo, 67 Kircher, Athanasius, 13 Korea, 241 Lacan, Jacques, 181 Lafayette, Madame de, 26; La Princesse de Clèves, 19, 26, 119, 168, 207; Zayde, 37, 39 La Fontaine, Jean de, 138, 147, 150; and fables, 130, 132; and scientific realism, 132 La Peyrère, Isaac, 220, 222 Law, John, 90 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 15, 93, 144, 153 Lenglet du Fresnoy, Nicolas, 43 Le Sage, Alain René, 17; Le diable boiteux, 17, 240 lesbianism, 207, 213, 214 Leskov, Nikolai, 244 Letters from a Persian in England to His Friend in Ispahan (Lyttelton), 80, 94–97, 218; and English society, 95–96; and Troglodytes, 95 Lettres persanes (Montesquieu), 49, 66, 75–94, 193, 213; allegory in, 227; and comparative critical Enlightenment, 270n13; and despotism, 160; and Diderot, 187; and epistolary form, 77–78; ethnographic observation in, 49, 78; and harems, 79; and jealousy, 271n16; narrative structure of, 86–87; and philosophical propositions, 270n12; and pseudoethnography, 29; and satire, 79, 90, 162; and secret chain, 16; and sociology, 90–91 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 146 Lewis, Bernard, 257n21 libertine literature, 180; libertine novel, 195; performative effect of, 224 libertine Orientalism, 125, 160–201; as alternative epistemology, 165 libertinism, 18, 29, 165, 174; as alternative to harem, 171; and dissimulation, 184; female, 206, 225; and fictional subjectiv-

ity, 164; French, 169; and hedonism, 185; and masculinity, 176; and metaphysics, 186; and oriental tale, 161; as philosophical discourse, 177; and satire, 202; in Le Sopha, 179; and universality, 201; and violence, 170; and virtue, 165; and waywardness, 180–81 Locke, John, 16, 92, 151–53 Louis XIV, 54, 78–79, 130, 165; and absolutism, 79, 90, 93; and aristocratic excess, 65; and jealousy, 271n16; and Marana, 40 Louis XV, 162, 184, 188, 190, 205 Loveridge, Mark, 279n44, 279n55, 280n62 Lukács, Georg, 24; and realist novel, 244; and transcendental homelessness of novel, 244, 247 Lyttelton, George, 94–96, 99, 102, 272n26, 272n28; and justice, 96; Letters from a Persian in England to His Friend in Ispahan, 80, 94–97, 218; reputation of, 272n27 Machiavelli, 92 Mahmut (character): and Christian tales of Islam, 63; and domestication of the foreign, 68; as Enlightenment Orientalist, 45; on spying and veiled woman, 59–60 Makdisi, Saree, 53 Malebranche, Nicolas, 153 Mandeville, John, 12, 14, 73, 142–44 Mangogul (character): as Louis XV, 187; and sexual epistemology, 199; as sovereign exception, 191; and triumph of empiricism, 189 Manley, Delarivier, 43–44, 202, 215, 231, 239–40; and allegory, 210–11, 242; and antinovelistic discourse, 266n60; and fantasy, 75; libertine fiction of, 224; literary techniques, 209; Memoirs of Europe, 211–12, 214; The New Atalantis, 62, 209–15; Orientalism in, 211, 213; and satire, 243; scandal fiction of, 29, 62, 228; The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, 26–27, 165, 208–10, 212; as translator, 26, 165 Marana, Giovanni Paolo, 16, 57, 99, 126; contrast with Defoe, 63; and cultural distance, 84; and domestication of the foreign, 68; impact in France and Britain, 40; as influence on Adventures of Eovaai (Haywood), 222; and political

Index conspiracy, 43; and pseudoethnography, 22, 29, 77, 196; as source of oriental tale, 49; The Turkish Spy, 40–50, 68, 75–76, 239 Markley, Robert, 97, 215 Markoe, Peter, 107–09; The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania, 107 Marlborough, Duchess of (Sarah Churchill), 26, 210, 213–15 Matar, Nabil, 12 Maurice, Thomas, 106–7 May, Georges, 70 Mayo, Robert D., 68, 139 McKeon, Michael, 20, 61, 141; and modern Enlightenment culture, 203; and secret history genre, 204; The Secret History of Domesticity, 203–4 McMurran, Mary Helen, 20–21 Melon, Jean-François, 177 metempsychosis, 135, 147, 177, 186–87, 243 Micromégas (Voltaire), 129, 151–54; and parody, 153; perspectival relativism and moral nihilism in, 283n105 Miles, Robert, 21 Mille et une nuits. See Arabian Nights, The Milton, John, 73, 139; Paradise Lost, 139 mimesis: Auerbach’s theory of, 231; and fiction, 38, 136, 183; and phenomenology, 205 Miquel, André, 268n81 Mirzoza (character): as anti-Scheherezade, 199; as Madame de Pompadour, 187; subjectivity of, 201 misogyny, 134, 157, 175, 224, 279n42; and Mangogul, 199; and scatology, 241 modernity, 70; and allegorical fiction, 204; archaic, 14; European, 9; and hybrid subjectivity, 167; and national space, 230; and novels, 7, 20–21, 28, 70, 203, 243; and oriental tales, 17 monarchy, 226–27, 229; absolutist, 83, 89, 93; constitutional and absolutist, 226; in Montesquieu, 89, 271n21; seraglio as allegory of, 81 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 5–6, 147, 206; and travels to the Ottoman Empire, 205; Turkish Embassy Letters, 206 Montagu, Ralph, 213 Montaigne, Michel de, 144–45 Montesquieu, 57, 76–97, 99, 102, 202; and Bernard, 161; De l’esprit des lois, 78, 82,

337

89–90, 126, 270n12; and despotism, 81; and Enlightenment, 51; and Enlightenment Orientalist fiction, 72, 168; imitations of, 97; and justice, 80, 270n12; and law, 271n23; Lettres persanes, 16, 49, 66, 75–94, 160, 162, 187, 193, 213, 227, 270n12, 270n13, 271n16; on monarchy and republic, 89, 271n21; and political theory, 83; and pseudoethnography, 22, 29, 196, 239; “Quelques réflexions sur les Lettres persanes,” 76, 78; and secret chain, 77, 80; and sovereignty theory, 93; translation of in England, 94 moral realism, 27, 151, 236 More, Thomas, 116 Moretti, Franco, 18; and global history of novel, 256n13; and novelistic subgenres, 270n7 Muhammad, 3, 161–62, 265n41 narration: intradiegetic and extradiegetic, 166; subjectivalist and objectivalist, 194, 198 narrative: and chronotopes, 26; as cumulative detail, 250; escapism and didacticism in, 225; and leisure, 245; moral function of, 235; and narrator-narrated distinction, 195; self and other in, 248; and storytelling, 244, 246; as transcultural activity, 69; translatability of, 234 nation: and hybridization of time-space, 237; remade by distorted fictional representation, 225 national allegory, 228 nationalism: cultural, 205; and empiricism, 247; and fictional subgenres, 160; and novelistic realism, 230; and oriental tales, 234; and xenophobia, 4 national realism, 23–24, 34, 62, 81, 118; Bakhtin and, 33, 75; birth of, 57; in Britain, 18, 205, 213; and cosmological realism, 127; as disciplinary authority, 140; and eighteenth-century literary culture, 21; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 242–43; and feminine fiction, 176; and intervalic chronotope, 237; as narcissistic, 227; and Roxana (Defoe), 67; Sheridan and critique of, 238; and stereotypes, 49; and transcultural allegory, 202, 230, 239; Voltairean challenges to, 150

338

Index

negative theology, 175; of Enlightenment Orientalism, 194; and Orientalist epistemology, 164 Newton, Isaac, 13, 231; and mechanics, 117; Newtonianism, 151; Principia Mathematica, 117 Nivernais, duc de, 184 North, Thomas, 130, 132 Nourjahad (character): anagnorisis of, 233; and character-functions, 236; as hero and antihero, 235; moral edification of, 234 Novak, Maximillian E., 25, 64 novel, 8; in Bakhtin, 34; and domestic realism, 6, 20, 24; and eighteenth century, 19, 25, 183, 237; emancipation and compensation in, 248; English, 34–35, 261n4; fictionality of, 19–20, 22–25, 259n49; and folktale, 58; and history, 24; idealism in, 18; as ideology, 21; and masculinity, 211; and media culture, 266n60; and modernity, 203–4; and morality, 24; and narrative detail, 246; and national culture, 74; and oriental tale, 20, 234, 247; promotion of, 25; and realism, 19–20, 28, 36, 182; rise of, 6–7, 18–28, 30, 164–65; and romance, 33, 35, 36, 71, 176; as transcultural, 67; and verisimilitude, 23 Nussbaum, Felicity, 53 object-narratives. See it-narratives Orient, 3–4, 8, 10, 53; as allegory, 175; in “Araby” (Joyce), 250; and Europe, 2, 5–6, 8; and origin of fiction, 72; as past, 9; and Said, 256n16; seductiveness of, 210; as superior to Occident, 5; and time-space, 237; as transcultural model, 182; in Voltaire, 150 oriental adventure, 58, 68; as chronotope, 251; as fantasy inside national realism, 238; and reversibility with domestic realism, 231 Oriental despotism, 236, 238; and domestic realism, 238; in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 217. See also despotism Orientalism, 2, 4–5, 9, 11, 63, 76; and amorality, 207; archaeological phase of, in France, 221; and classicism, 213; cosmological, 148; as cosmopolitanism, 3; and culture, 200, 257n21; early forms

of, 9; and Enlightenment, 3, 159, 182; failure of in Oroonoko (Behn), 207–8; and female subject, 173; and fiction, 6, 176; geography of, 202; in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 143; Irish, 252; in Manley, 211; and national narratives, 208; and political philosophy, 89; reappropriations of, 193; and Said, 1–4, 8, 10, 256n16, 256n17; as scholarly practice, 12–13; and sexuality, 160, 165, 171, 191; subject of, 170; transcultural framework of in eighteenth century, 202–3; and xenophilia, 253. See also Enlightenment Orientalism Orientalist libertinism. See libertine Orientalism Oriental singularity, 78–80; and Enlightenment political construction, 89; and sexuality, 84–88 See also singularity oriental tale, 25, 28, 35, 256n13; as actionoriented, 57–58; and anti-Walpole satire, 218, 294n44; attacks on and criticism of, 164, 268n82; in Britain and France, 96, 294n43; in brothels, 189–90; and chronology, 68; as critique, 5, 296n67; denegation and marginalization of, 70, 73, 177; and domestic realism, 7; and epistemology, 77, 164; evolution into Christian moral tale, 265n41; and exoticism, 18; and fiction, 26, 57; and folktale, 249; incorporation of domestic and foreign in, 21; and it-narratives, 196; libertinism in, 161; and Marana, 49; as moral, 238; and nationalism, 25–26; and the novel, 6, 20, 34, 234; 247, 248; origins of, 50–51; as return of the repressed, 29; and romance, 28; and sexuality, 183–84; and singularity, 78; as style and genre, 4, 51, 53, 231; as transcultural allegory, 29; and verisimilitude, 71 Oroonoko (Behn), 19, 58–62, 127; authenticity of events in, 58, 60; and beast fable, 141–42; and colonial origin of English novel, 207–8; and cultural translation, 61; as Enlightenment Orientalism, 60, 208; and erotic epistemology, 128; and pseudoethnography, 59; and surveillance, 60 Ottoman Empire, 51, 166, 195; military and political decline of, 205

Index Pacific Ocean, 142 Pañcatantra, The, 27, 51, 55, 147; as transcultural fable, 130 parody, 10, 51, 98; in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 142; of theology, 220; in Voltaire, 153 Patterson, Annabel, 137 Pavel, Thomas, 18, 183, 237 Pearson, Roger, 153 Persian Letters, The (Montesquieu). See Lettres persanes Pétis de la Croix, François 27, 50, 79; Mille et un jours: Contes persans, 87; Thousand and One Days, 55; Turkish Tales, 27 Petronius, 152, 157 pets, 147 philosophy, 4, 28, 101, 105, 117; of anthropocentric humanism, 147; Arabic, 15; Eastern, 16; empirical, 199; in Fontenelle, 119–20; and Montesquieu’s secret chain, 79–80; moral, 8, 55, 134, 211; natural, 186; political, 89, 106, 147, 150, 272n26 Picart, Bernard, 154, 158, 161; Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde, 126, 154, 161, 173 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 15 Pococke, Edward, 15–16, 161 Polo, Marco, 14, 73, 142–43 Pomeau, René, 150 Pompadour, Madame de, 157, 184, 188; and surveillance, 289n52 Pope, Alexander: and compassion toward animals, 16, 135–37; Dunciad Variorum, 223; and elitism of satire, 227 Porter, David, 223 Porter, Roy, 7, 143 Postel, Guillaume, 13 Prakash, Gyan, 14 pre-Adamites, 221–22; and pre-Adamitical history, 219–20, 222 préciosité: as critical method, 126; in literature, 119 predicative literature, 57, 65; and narrative function, 238; and Ulysses (Joyce), 250 Prévost, Abbé, 125, 166, 194, 285n13; Histoire d’une Grècque moderne, 165–76; libertinism and préciosité in, 286n18; and Orientalism, 169; and sexualization of Enlightenment Orientalism, 29; as translator, 165, 176 Propp, Vladimir, 56, 236, 265n46; character-

339

function, 235; and folktale, 232; Morphology of the Folktale, 56 Protestantism, 162 Psammenitus, 183, 246 pseudoethnography, 22, 59, 74, 77, 101; and astronomy, 119; and convergence of exoticism and supernatural, 225; and cosmopolitanism, 100; and cultural relativism, 126; and Enlightenment, 29, 164; and Marana, 202; as object-centered, 196; as satire, 80; and spy fiction, 35; and theriophily, 140–50 public right, 93–94 public sphere, 203–04; and novelistic realism, 230; as sexualized in France, 191 Pucci, Suzanne, 197 Puritanism, 162, 184 Rabelais, François, 116, 194, 240 rationalism, 132; Confucian, 144–45; Renaissance, 48 realism, 18, 26, 125, 204, 253; anti-, 219; and The Arabian Nights, 71, 265n41; colonial, 208; in eighteenth-century England, 40; and erotic desire, 224; in fable, 139; and fantasy, 164, 217; and fiction, 155; in History of Nourjahad (Sheridan), 231; and modernization hypotheses, 213; moral and sociological, 71; and national canon, 39; post-Enlightenment desire for, 231; purity of, 28; Reeve and, 33; reversibility of, 230; rise of, 205; and secret histories, 62; transparency and distance in, 228; in The Turkish Spy (Marana), 262n21; Watt and, 237. See also domestic realism; national realism; realist novel realist novel, 24–26, 208–9, 217, 227; as didactic, 140, 164; and national selves, 125; and oral storytelling, 249; and oriental tales, 71, 248; and roman à clef, 215; and scandal fiction, 184, 202; as secular religion, 243; and transcultural fiction, 229 Reeve, Clara, 42, 71, 74; Charoba, 71–72, 269n92; and fiction, 20–21, 28, 72; and novel-romance distinction, 33, 35; as Orientalist writer, 71–72; The Progress of Romance, 33, 71 religion: and cross-cultural comparison, 161; and politics, 162; and sexual burlesque, 285n9

340

Index

Renaissance: astronomical discoveries of, 116; and English prose fiction, 39; and Orient, 10, 11, 13, 120 republicanism, 89, 226, 229, 295n58 Revel, Jacques, 161 Richardson, Samuel, 195, 198, 258n45, 266n60; and Anglophone realist novel, 182; Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, 19, 139–40, 165, 175–76; and Diderot, 165; and idealism, 28; and letter genre, 43; Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 139, 165, 209, 218; and Prévost, 175–76 Richelieu, Cardinal (Armand Jean du Plessis), 44, 49 Richelieu, duc de (Armand de Vignerot du Plessis), 184, 194 Richetti, John, 35, 62, 210 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 15–16, 57, 141, 248; influence of, 69 Rogers, Pat, 96 roman à clef, 207, 209, 226; and Histoire d’une Grècque moderne (Prévost), 165; and Montesquieu’s secret chain, 77; and realist novel, 62, 215 romance (mode), 8, 35–37, 71, 237; and antiromance, 220; in The Arabian Nights, 265n41; and cultural hierarchy, 247; and fiction, 28, 72, 217; and history, 37; origin of, 11; and verisimilitude, 38 Romanticism, 5, 9, 14, 21, 34, 74, 98, 203, 231 Rousseau, G. S., 7, 143 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28, 182; Émile, 19, 140; and Troglodytes, 272n26 Roxana (Defoe), 64–68, 164 Russell, G. A., 17 Rycaut, Paul, 83, 211, 223 Sade, Marquis de (Donatien Alphonse François), 181, 195 Said, Edward 76, 90, 253; attacks on, 11, 257n21; Culture and Imperialism, 8; Orientalism, 1, 11; and Orientalism, 1–4, 8, 10, 256n17; and transmission of ideas, 263n26 Saint-Amand, Pierre, 180 Sallis, Eva, 53 sati, 104, 158; British condemnation of, 273n43 satire, 101, 106, 177, 218; of Britain and India, 105; and fiction, 217; in Haywood, 227; and libertinism, 202; and moral

philosophy, 211; and Orientalist fantasy, 213; in Swift, 144–47; utopia in, 117; in Voltaire, 151–52, 155–57; and Walpole, 218, 295n58 scandal chronicle, 20, 64, 202, 209; in France and England, 207; and Histoire d’une Grècque moderne (Prévost), 165; and The History and Adventures of an Atom (Smollett), 240; and Manley, 29, 62; references in, 215, 228 scatology: and Orientalism, 243; in Smollett and Sterne, 240; and social hierarchies, 241 Schahriar, 52, 72–73, 179, 181, 193 Scheherezade, 26, 52, 72–73, 140, 177, 181–82, 193, 245; as antithesis of novel, 248; as Molly Bloom in Ulysses (Joyce), 251; and transculturation, 253 Schlegel, Friedrich, 22, 75 Schwab, Raymond, 11–12 science: as language, 119, 125; and religion, 128 Scott, Walter, 258n46, 269n96 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 24, 50 secret history (genre), 204; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 207; and fiction, 209; in Smollett, 242 Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, The (Manley), 26–27, 212, 165; influenced by Hattigé, 209–10; truth and improbability in, 208 seduction: in Haywood, 225; and libertinism, 168; narratives of, 62, 213; Orientalization of, 210 self: cultural reconfi guration of, 171; and Enlightenment, 3; European, 175; national and Oriental, 67, 76–77; and other, 3, 201, 248; porous and buffered, 22, 29 sex: in discourse, 289n61; epistemology of, 191; in Manley, 214; and politics, 207, 224 sexuality: and brothels, 189–90; and cultural comparison, 160; discourses on, 190, 192, 289n61; hermeneutics of, 195–96; political, 191; and women, 168, 187 Sgard, Jean, 186 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 198–99; Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit 198–99 Sheraa, Sultana (character): as literary critic, 178–79; as Madame de Pompadour, 184 Sheridan, Frances, 29, 202; and genre, 231,

Index 237; History of Nourjahad, 138, 231–39, 250, 296n67; and narrative, 235–36 Shklar, Judith, 8, 255n10, 271n20 Sindbad, 57, 73, 265n46; in Joyce, 251–52; and similarity with Gulliver, 143 Singerman, Alan J., 169 singularity, 77–79, 92, 146, 201; and Chinese culture, 98; and colonial literature, 101; and justice, 91–92, 94; and Lettres persanes (Montesquieu), 78–79, 81, 88 sinology, 222, 257n31 Siskin, Clifford, 3, 21, 25 skepticism, 18, 110, 205; and critique of religion, 126 Skimmer, The, or The History of Tanzaï et Néadarné (Crébillon), 162–64, 184, 222; religion in, 285n9 Smollett, Tobias, 29, 35, 202; and Enlightenment Orientalism, 242; The History and Adventures of an Atom, 239–43; scatology and satire in, 240–41, 243 sofas, 185–86, 192 Sopha, Le (Crébillon), 165, 176–87, 240; as Enlightenment Orientalism, 187; publication history of, 177 sovereignty, 93; early modern structure of, 147; as narrative, 177 Spain, 241 speculum principis, 129, 235, 238; as popular genre, 27, 135 spy fiction, 34, 41, 43, 45; as Enlightenment Orientalism, 40; and Oroonoko (Behn), 59; as pseudoethnography, 29, 35, 49; and Turkish Spy, 41–49 Sterne, Laurence, 195, 240; Tristram Shandy, 22, 57, 242–43 Stoler, Ann, 192 Stubbe, Henry, 3 Sublime Porte. See Ottoman Empire Suleri, Sara, 103 Surinam, 59–60 surveillance: as literary technique, 60; and politics, 61; sexual, 189 surveillance chronicle. See spy fiction Swift, Jonathan, 139–51, 216; An Account of the Court and Empire of Japan, 215; Gulliver’s Travels, 118, 129, 140–51, 215–18; and Haywood, 225; “A Modest Proposal,” 242; and satire, 129, 240, 243; A Tale of a Tub, 147, 223; and theriophily, 145

341

Taylor, Charles, 22 Temple, William, 14, 144, 257n31; Of Heroic Virtue, 14, 144 theology, 163, 198, 201; Catholic, 115; Christian, 3; and parody of, 220 theriophily, 129; and pseudoethnography, 140–50; and utopia, 150 Todorov, Tzvetan, 65, 92; and action, 182, 246, 265n46, 268n81; and The Arabian Nights, 56–58, 69; and predicative literature, 56–57, 232, 250 Toland, John, 3 Traité de l’origine des Romans (Huet), 36–39 transcreation, 17, 52–54, 252 transcultural allegory, 29, 202–43; in Haywood, 228, 230; and national realism, 239. See also allegory transculturation, 33–75, 50–51, 253; and The Arabian Nights, 54, 56; and fiction, 75; and metropolitan literature, 101; and the novel, 67 translation, 17, 21, 33–75, 253; cultural, 80, 212; and femininity, 128, 166; in French literary culture, 50; and national literatures, 74; and translatio, 17, 40, 273n44; as trope, 62 Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Elizabeth Hamilton), 49, 80, 102–5, 109 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 22, 57, 242–43; scatology in, 240 Turkish Spy, The (Marana), 40–50, 68, 75–76, 239; as Enlightenment Orientalism, 40, 44; imitations and translations of, 41, 45; influence on Defoe, 64; and preAdamite histories, 222 Turks, 45, 48 Tyssot de Patot, Simon, 3 universalism, 3, 14, 102, 109, 161, 203, 296n67; failure of, 201; philosophical, 15; scientific, 29, 126–27 utilitarianism, 88, 91 utopianism, 16, 56, 62, 145, 149, 226, 229; sexual, 206; and theriophily, 150 verisimilitude, 23, 26, 37, 264n36; in fable, 38, 136, 140, 152; and implausibility, 125, 141 Vico, Giambattista, 12, 128 Vitkus, Daniel, 12

342

Index

Voltaire, 93, 124, 139, 144, 202; Candide, ou l’optimisme, 152; fables and satires of, 118, 129, 150; and fiction, 153; Micromégas, 129, 151–54, 283n105; Le monde comme il va, 152, 155–56, 159; on religion, 155, 162; Le taureau blanc, 152–53, 155; Zadig, ou la destinée, 129, 156–59 vorticism, 117, 124 voyeurism, 41, 45, 179–80; and the state, 190–91 Wade, Ira, 154 Walpole, Horace, 100 Walpole, Robert, 224, 227; in early English fiction, 218; in Haywood, 215, 226 Walton, Brian, 13 Warner, William, 3, 65, 266n60, 267n73, 269n96 Warton, Thomas, 72 Watt, Ian, 59, 165, 202, 266n60, 268n87, 269n96; and history of fiction, 18, 20; and national realism, 59; and romance, 237 Webb, John, 13–14

White, Hayden, 231–32, 234–35 Wilkins, John, 117 Williams, Kathleen, 147 Wolff, Christian, 144; Elementa matheseos universae, 151 women: agency and freedom of, 168, 206; in Britain and colonial India, 104; and literary professionalism, 274n46 world (concept): and plurality of worlds theory, 16, 118, 120, 122, 127; and universe, 117 xenophilia, 10, 123, 150; and Orientalism, 6, 253 xenophobia, 10, 76 xenotrope, 37, 39, 231, 239 Yang, Chi-Ming, 187 Young, Edward, 21–22 zoontology, 147, 150 Zoroastrianism, 88, 108, 130, 158, 252, 271n19, 278n31